


Double... trouble?

by artsies



Category: Naruto
Genre: Hokage!Iruka, KakaIru is endgame, M/M, and middle-game?, female!Iruka, fuinjutsu specialist!Iruka, i took a concept and ran with it, iruka is just continuously screaming on the inside and hoping for the best, playing around with alternate universes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-02
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2019-05-01 05:14:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 33,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14513316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/artsies/pseuds/artsies
Summary: Iruka humms awkwardly, unsure of how to phrase 'I was doing illegal experiments trying to come up with a new seal for Kotetsu because I'm a sucker for heartfelt monologues about the power of love like the disaster gay I am’ without admitting to clandestine activities or his habit of crying at sad poetry late at night.





	1. Unfortunate beginnings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dahtwitchi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dahtwitchi/gifts).



In principle, it was a nice, quiet Sunday afternoon, perfect for being lazy, catching up on reading, or taking a relaxing trip to the onsen. But no. Not for Iruka. No, Iruka is coughing from the bitter smoke rising up from his seal experiment, disoriented from the earthquake-like shock it sent through his system at four in the afternoon. He hopes his landlord hasn't heard or felt it, because he likes this apartment and really doesn't want to move _again_.

“What the fuck?”

Iruka's eyes snap up at the sound of someone else's voice. He was definitely alone in his home a minute ago! Of effing course, now there is an older man with a low ponytail and a scar across his nose staring back at him, frowning as his hands hover near his weapons pouch and scroll holder strapped across his chest.

Wait a minute.

Iruka does a double take. Notes the eyes, the shape of the nose, the cheekbones; even the small scar on the left hand, from the index finger to the wrist, barely visible.

“You are… me?”, the other man whispers with wide eyes, obviously having had the same train of thought, and Iruka glances at his ruined experiment at their feet in horror.

“Oh no.”, he squeaks, and not-him Iruka follows his gaze to the ground, sucking in a sharp breath at the sight of both the ruined carpet and the partially destroyed seal between them.

It definitely didn't do what it was supposed to.

They stare at each other dumbly for about a minute, unsure of what to say, - and just a little creeped out -, until there is a loud knock at the door, followed by Naruto's incomprehensible bellows. Now, at this point, loathe as he is to admit it, Iruka panics and shoves not-him him into his closet, (who gives an undignified squak) and closes his bedroom door just in time to see Naruto burst through his front door with the aid of the spare key he gave him. There is still some smoke wafting around his apartment, unfortunately.

“Iruka-sensei!”, the boy rushes to him, blue eyes huge and hands reaching, and he can't help but put his hands on his shoulders when he is enveloped in a hug, “Are you okay? We heard a loud explosion!”

“I-I’m fine…”, well, except for apparently having summoned himself somehow. He needs to get Naruto out of here before the universe collapses in on itself or something.

“Naruto you dumbass!”, Sakura yells from his genkan, her pink hair frazzled, and Iruka resists the urge to slap himself on the forehead, because of course the rest of Team Seven would be here, “Take your shoes off!”

Kakashi waves at him from behind his genin lazily, hands in his pockets. (Well, technically, Sakura is a chunin now, but Naruto is still training with Jiraiya, so.) He tries to smile at them, but there is just an edge of hilarity to it that he can't hide. He hopes other-him is still-

“Holy shit, they are so cute!”

No, of course not. Because that is not how his day is going. At all. Naruto predictably falls on his ass in shock with a huge yell, Sakura is rendered speechless, and Iruka is pretty sure Kakashi has a kunai in his hand and a couple of senbon ready to be thrown at the head peeking out from his bedroom, despite his slouch.

“What are you doing?”, he hisses at not-him, hoping to de-escalate this horrible, no-good day, “Get back in the closet!”

Older, not-him Iruka looks insulted at the mere suggestion.

“I haven't been there since I was fourteen”, he huffs, “and I’m sure as hell not going back now.”

Iruka splutters, because honestly, coming out to Team Seven including  _ motherfucking Hatake Kakashi on whom he most certainly has no crush thank you very much  _ was not on today’s agenda, especially not via accidentally summoned alternate or future self. He shoots not-him an angry look, but he just steps out into the hall next to him with a self-satisfied look on his face. They must make a sight; not-him is perhaps ten years older, and his ponytail loose around the nape of his neck, but otherwise, they seem pretty identical. (He can practically hear the gears in Kakashi’s head turn.)

Sakura opens her mouth to speak, but not-him cuts her off.

“It's also a little undignified for a Hokage, don't you think?”

Iruka knows instinctively that not-him is milking this situation for all it's worth, but still his eyes are so wide they feel like they are saucers. Hokage?! Not-him is a hokage? (Should he believe him? Is not-Iruka Iruka a liar?) Naruto seems to share his shocked confusion, albeit much more loudly.

“Who the hell are you?! And who made you hokage?!”, he says, jumping to his feet and pointing with all his fourteen year old fierceness at the mostly bemused not-him.

“So cute.”, not-him whispers lovingly, and Iruka feels a tiny bit jealous and protective, “You grow up so damn fast, idiot. I’m your jōnin sensei, by the way. Well, in my plane of existence at least.”

Naruto squints in confusion, and Iruka has to stifle laugh at his dumb little face; not-him,  _ hokage _ him has no qualms, however, and laughs heartily at the boy.

“Iruka-sensei.”, Kakashi says from the doorway, and his eye is serious even if his pose is seemingly relaxed, “That's not a clone now, is it?”

Iruka humms awkwardly, unsure of how to phrase 'I was doing illegal experiments trying to come up with a new seal for Kotetsu because I'm a sucker for heartfelt monologues about the power of love like the disaster gay I am’ without admitting to clandestine activities or his habit of crying at sad poetry late at night. Not-him crosses his arms, jutting out his chin in defiance and narrowing his eyes at the jōnin.

“No, I’m not. Who are you and what are you doing with my cute little genins?”, he asks, and the notion that Kakashi is unfamiliar to this self surprises Iruka; somehow, him not existing seemed like an impossibility. It also squarely places hokage!Iruka into the alternate reality category, as he had already implied, so there is that, at least.

“I made a small mistake”, Iruka says quickly, because something tells him he shouldn't let his alternate self interact with Kakashi at all, (and it's not jealousy, really), “with a sealing technique. I’ll fix it.”

Kakashi gives him a flat look, and Sakura's eyes flicker nervously between them. Naruto is still squinting at hokage!Iruka, unmindful of the conversation.

“You invented a summoning from an alternate reality. As a small mistake.”, not-him says in monotone, but the edge of his mouth keeps curling up. “You're wild, Iruka-chan.” 

Iruka splutters, and resists the urge to hit not-himself in the throat for full five seconds.

\---

Tsunade looks torn between banging her head against the table repeatedly and cackling like a mad scientist, and Iruka can't really blame her. This could have been a breakthrough - if it hadn't been a complete accident and against standing orders. But as it is, he is in deep shit, and everything that has happened here must be kept absolutely classified - he even had to pull his curtains closed and have the Hokage come to him, which is utterly mortifying in a way. She looks incredibly out of place in Iruka's small kitchen, sitting at Iruka's worn dining table, staring at not-Iruka with that sharp gaze of hers, while his alternate self sips his tea with some apprehension. He wonders morosely if his teaching career will survive this. His mood isn’t helped by Kakashi bumping into him whenever he shifts or Iruka takes a drink, as there is barely enough room to fit them all around the table.

“So, Tsunade-sama is Godaime here.”, not-him says, glancing at Iruka again by his side. “Strange. But then what am… what are you, Iruka-chan, if not the Godaime?”

Iruka blushes, averting his gaze from his infinitely more successful version, but to his surprise, before he can answer Kakashi jumps into the conversation, despite having been silent so far.

“Iruka-sensei is one of our most well-respected Academy instructors”, he drawls, but there is a sense of tension behind his tone. Curious. “He was Naruto's and Sakura's teacher, as well.”

Tsunade drums her fingers on the table once, killing the conversation before it can even really begin as she shoots the jōnin a steely look. She pinches her lips after she declares, “This needs to be taken to the Hatake compound. It has to be undone, but it cannot be seen, and this apartment is far too small to house all five of you.”

Come again. Five? Was Tsunade-sama assigning Team Seven to, what, escort him? Or was he under arrest? Naruto begins to mutter something, but Iruka is too caught up in images of his own execution to really pay attention.

“I understand.”, Kakashi replies in a carefully blank tone.

Iruka really doesn't have the heart to tell them exactly how many books on fuinjutsu they are going to have to move for this plan. He’s deciding on which photo to give Naruto for his funeral anyway.


	2. Late night rendezvous

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who left kudos and comments! I'm sorry it took so long to post such a short chapter - I would have liked to have doubled this in size -, but I have various RL fires I need to attend to instead of sitting around drinking a cup of tea and saying it's all fine. Also please excuse any mistakes of spelling and grammar, English is not my native language and this is unbetad.

Not-him Iruka is taking things in stride, all things considered. Which is more than Iruka can say for himself, really, seeing that he still obsessing over his funeral arrangements, stuck on trying to decide whether he should ask Naruto to take his ashes to the ocean and scatter them in the wind, or to bury him in the forest at their favorite spot. (He is pretty sure he is still eligible for a memorial service if he is a criminal per se, so at least his expenses for the cremation will be paid, but he has to talk to Naruto about this whole memorial service for the first seven days schtick, because that is way too expensive and Iruka will be frugal even in death. ~~He’s been the King of Budgeting since he was sixteen, and he is not about to be dethroned by a mere inconvenience like death.~~ ) Also, don’t get him started on his classes. Honestly. It’s a veritable disaster, you see, because he hasn’t the faintest who will take over his students on such short notice, or how he will even give them the lesson plans, being locked up at Hatake ManorTM and all. 

He is never doing Kotetsu a favor ever again, no matter how hard that bum is going to pray at his tombstone. No. Just no. In fact, he’ll consider becoming a vengeful spirit, haunting, say, the mission room. Or maybe the tokubetsu lounge? Do onryō get to pick, or is it a mission-oriented gig? 

Anyway.

Hokage!Iruka doesn't make a fuss about the tracking seal Tsunade places on him, and he easily agrees to a henge into Naruto for the walk across the village too, while the real Naruto and his bunshins struggle with Iruka’s really quite tiny library (honest, really) and travel pack, without much of a dent in his cheery disposition. Of course, said disposition consists mostly of teasing Iruka about his bleary outlook on the future, and subtly about his love life, a fact Iruka doesn't appreciate at all, because a) asking who Iruka took a tumble in the sheets with last should not be words coming from Naruto's mouth, like, ever, even if he is a fake Naruto, and b) Hatake ‘currently denied crush’ Kakashi is walking alongside them, and he’d really like to maintain some form of dignity for the remainder of his very short life, thank you very much.

Iruka looks to the heavens for solace. The clouds don’t seem to give a damn.

Truthfully, if there is one thing that actually seems to worry his alternate ‘chill-pill’ self in all of this, it is aforementioned Hatake Kakashi. Iruka can’t help but notice how he keeps sneaking looks at the other man as they amble along the streets of Konoha; suspicious glances that measured opponents in battle, not appraising looks for comrades. (Okay, appraising and looking are words he should not be putting together into a sentence in the context of Kakashi, because he blushes easily and not-him has an eye like a hawk for it, and shit he’s been caught already. Look at your toes, look at your toes.) The notion that not-him sees an enemy in the other man makes him nauseous, like the overwhelming sense of helplessness always does, so he tries to remain firmly between them as they walk the streets in a pace befitting their grandfathers when beer is on sale at the corner store. (So, relatively fast among the slow category.) With each new corner they turn, he hopes with all of his being that they have finally arrived so he can promptly hole himself up in the tiniest corner and ignore the situation fully and professionally.

However… he has shitty luck. ~~He feels that this is going to be a running theme of his life from now own.~~

Maybe he’s been too frugal with the offerings. Yes, that makes sense. That could be why the buddhas and gods apparently detest him with all their supernatural might, and the Hatake compound turns out to be at the very edge of the village -, a long, torturously long walk away from his home, filled with admittedly well-crafted innoundoes from not-him in the guise of Naruto (no, just no), punctuated by a couple of snorts from the Copy-nin. (If he wasn't getting executed, Iruka would probably try his hand at this missing-nin deal, so he would never have to look him in the eye again.) He does understand the Hokage's choice the moment the sprawling building comes into sight, though; it's far from any prying eyes, surrounded by thick wards and fields, and he feels the faint buzz of a dusting jutsu hover over it. 

They could blow several things up quite nicely here, and no one would be the wiser for it. Ahaha.

Once they are inside and the door closes with a soft click behind them in a poor imitation of a heavy jail cell door slamming shut loudly, hokage!Iruka drops the henge and slings an arm around his neck, bumping their heads together like brothers would. Well, in a weird way they kind of are. A very weird way that Iruka doesn’t want to think about at all.

“Ah, am I jealous of you, Iruka-chan! You are living the goddamn dream!”, and when Iruka more or less squeaks in incomprehension as he tries to disentangle himself from his arm to take his shoes off, not-him lets him go with a wistful sigh of, “Mom tore up my application for the Academy post the moment she saw it. She lectured me for a week straight!”

Oh.

Mom.

Iruka freezes for a moment, and he is glad his back is turned to the others because he has to will the sudden sting behind his eyes away. _Mom._ (He was just hesitating about where to place his sandals. Yes, nothing to see here.) The thought that this other Iruka grew up with her fills him with a strange, painful jealousy, which doubles when he thinks about Dad; no wonder he made jōnin. He had Mom and Dad there to explain everything Iruka couldn't get, to teach him jutsu that he could never learn, to guide him where he had to fumble on his own.

Not-him wasn’t alone.

“Iruka-sensei. Let me show you to your room.”, Kakashi's voice breaks through his momentary haze, and he steps away to follow the other man, ignoring the way hokage!Iruka glares at the silver head. 

He tells himself it's okay, the way things turned out, that he is _fine_.

\---

When Naruto is done transporting everything from Iruka's place, (and yelling at Iruka for amassing a relatively small collection of books on fuinjutsu, _nobody needs this many books Iruka-sensei, I swear_ ), Kakashi shows them around. They are in what turns out to be the east wing of the estate, and the words sound absolutely ridiculous, because it makes Iruka compare Kakashi to that landed gentry who gives the heroine who’s a little too prideful and a bit prejudiced a tour of his home in that foreign romance novel he reads in secret. (Kurenai-sensei lent it to him.) The west is uninhabitable, he says at the end of the tour, but Iruka has the definite impression it's because of the ghosts of memories and not anything else from the tight corner of his eye. He feels bad about forcing Kakashi back here, into a house he doesn't want to be in, with Iruka who he doesn't want to be with in either version of him. (Jury is still out on Naruto and Sakura.) The jōnin then sends the kids out grocery shopping while the three of them air the rooms, clean the bathroom and the kitchen; no one had lived here for a while, and no dusting jutsu is perfect, after all.

So Iruka scrubs the tub vehemently, still feeling a little off-center from his alternate's earlier revelation. He tries to put his energies into deep cleaning, mindful that he hasn't obsessed about his parents’ passing since he was... fourteen, really. Absolutely ridiculous. He has other things to worry about, if he must, like how in the frickity frack is he going to undo this whole mess. That would be productive worrying, unlike… this thing. So what if other Iruka was lucky not to lose them in the attack? What if he made jōnin? At least Iruka got to teach, he… he...

… yeah, there isn't much about him.

He sighs, scrubbing harder. It was all fine until this stupid experiment backfired. He had accepted that he was mediocre at best, satisfied with his little home, with the friendships he has, finding joy and comfort in teaching, and nursing a sweet crush on Hatake Kakashi since the day they'd met with no intention of ever making a move. After all, if Kakashi was lightning, bright and fearsome and a part of the heavens, Iruka was the moss growing in the depths of the forest, rootless and replaceable, not even part of the earth itself. And lightning always strikes the highest tree.

“Iruka-sensei.”, the door opens softly, almost inaudibly to reveal the man himself, “They're back, so I’d like to - Wow. This bathroom has never been this clean.”

Iruka flushes in embarrassment, looking away. He’s taken too long, and now he is impeding Kakashi in holding his mission briefing. Typical. Why can't he ever do something right?

“I'm sorry, Kakashi-sensei, I’ll be right there. Are we still meeting in the kitchen?”

The other man nods, and Iruka hurries to finish his task. He finds everyone else already in the bright and quite large kitchen, which is in a less than desirable state of cleanliness. (Hokage!Iruka probably has someone else to do his cleaning for him. Sigh.) The shopping is still all unpacked, bags and bags of food and necessities, and he wonders how long they expect this take; although, well, Naruto and Sakura are both probably at the age when they inhale mountains of food and then proceed to grow even lankier during the night, so maybe it’s just two days’ worth of rations. He joins the others at the sizable table, sitting next to Naruto who is still squinting suspiciously at his alternate self, the latter sipping his tea serenely, like he hasn’t told dirty jokes while transformed into the boy a couple of hours ago. He imagines his protege is still convinced this is some sort of elaborate hoax meant to trick him, and is looking for a slip-up.

“If you are my jōnin-sensei”, the boy pouts, linking his arm jealously with Iruka's, “who taught me at the Academy, huh, Iruka-ji-san?”

Not-him Iruka spits out his tea, and it’s the best thing Iruka has seen all day. “Ji-san?! You - what - ji-san?! Me?! How dare you?!”, he wheezes, face growing red with indignation, and Iruka tries to hide his laughter behind his hand, tickled by not-him - excuse him - Ji-san’s vanity. (It's not a very successful attempt, as he receives dark looks.)

(It serves him right.)

“If we may get started.”, Kakashi places a cup of nice hot tea in front of Iruka, before taking his own seat at the head of the table. Naruto begins to munch loudly on the crackers, acting like he has absolutely forgotten not-him’s total indignation at being called old. Oh, all he needs is a fox’s tail to swish around, the sly thing.

And it totally doesn't make Iruka feel better that his arm is still linked with his. 

Pfft. No.

\---

Iruka is not at all proud of what he is about to do, but he absolutely cannot fall asleep like this. In fact, short of the heavens striking him down, there is nothing that could possibly stop him from pulling on a pair of yellow rubber gloves and heading to the kitchen with a flask of degreaser. He knows it's not quite healthy to feel such urges and then to give in to them in someone else's home, but Sakura never cleaned the spills from her admittedly delicious dinner and every time he closes his eyes, the stains _haunt_ him. He prays she at least put the pot in to soak, or he is going to scream in terror.

… She didn't. (He opens his mouth, but no sound comes out.) He tries not to have a heart attack as he soaks them, telling himself that after he is done with the stovetop, he’ll be able to sleep. Really. He will. It's not like there is anything to keep him awake, like devising a solution to a terribly misfired seal that summoned his alternate self from a different dimension. Oh no, he’ll sleep like a baby.

There are pink hairs in the drain, the water sluggishly disappearing. Oh buddhas and gods help him, he is going to have to unclog this, isn't he? He looks out at the pale moon from the kitchen window, wondering if there is a shrine out there with a kami dedicated to clean homes or if there is a slim chance at all that he’ll be able to fix his mistake from this afternoon. What happens if not-him Iruka is stuck here forever? Has he single handedly ruined the fate of a parallel Konoha by kidnapping their leader? Does that make him an interdimensional traitor?

To stop his thoughts from spiraling totally out of control and ending up crying in the middle of the night on the Hatake estate's kitchen floor, he busies himself with vehemently scrubbing at the grease burned on the stove and in the oven. He even manages to reach that strange meditative state, where seals come and twist themselves into beautiful new shapes in his mind’s eye, combining and enticing him.

Which is exactly why he throws his sponge at the voice that suddenly says “Iruka-sensei.”, just about suppressing a wildly embarrassing scream. His heart thumps loudly in his chest, and he flushes at having been caught so off guard by -

Mortified, he watches _goddamn Hatake Kakashi_ catch the sooty thing, silver hair shining in the moonlight. That's it. He’s reached rock bottom, there is no lower Iruka could possibly sink in his crush’s eyes. He might as well give up and just become a hermit. The man walks towards him, three strides until he towers over Iruka, holding the sponge out for him gingerly, and it’s like he’s forgotten how to speak, nay, breathe, as he takes the offending piece of cleaning supply back. 

“I'm sorry I startled you. I couldn't sleep knowing the drain was beginning to clog up.”, Iruka notices that there is a bottle of vinegar in the man's other hand, and he feels himself fall in love hard right at that moment, “And I see I was not alone in my dissatisfaction of the post-supper clean up.”

“Ah, well. It helps me think…”, he replies lamely, following out of the corner of his eye Kakashi’s shape, the swift movements as he prepares for his task; the appreciating humm when he sees the pan Iruka had soaked warms his chest in ways that it shouldn’t. He forces himself to concentrate on the oven again, but it proves exceedingly difficult.

(About ten minutes of silent work later, they turn to the figure appearing in the kitchen door. Not-him Iruka’s hair is messy from sleep, the pijama Iruka had lent him askew on his defined frame; he blinks owlishly at them, hand hovering by the light switch, before shaking his head and turning around with a mutter that sounds suspiciously like, “What the frick frack is wrong with this reality, honestly, I was just gonna get a cup of water, but no, they are cleaning in the freaking middle of the night, holy shit, I miss my husband.”)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Who want to guess who Ji-san's husband is? *wiggles eyebrows*


	3. The way to a man's heart is definitely through his stomach

“So…”, Naruto begins, mouth still half-full with lunch, and both Ji-san and Iruka throw him reprimanding looks, “How long is this going to take, like, approximately? Because if I leave the perverted hermit alone too long, he is going to blow all our money on women again.”

Iruka pinches the bridge of his nose, willing his disaster of a headache caused by staring in fruitless panic at seals all morning to not grow about five times in size at these words. He let him go with _that_ man because he is one of the three great ninjas. Great ninja, Iruka. Think of the wonderful techniques Naruto will learn, how this will benefit his education and his safety, and not the sick lurch in your stomach that he is away with someone who is an unashamed pervert and seems barely equipped to handle a teenager. Do not think about that weekly fantasy where you storm into the Office of Births, Marriages, and Family Affairs, slap down your prepared folder of adoption papers and not leave until someone signs you the fucking guardianship, nor the one where you get Naruto back into Konoha, buy a cute apartment, let the orange ball of endless energy decorate his room with ramen memorabilia and spend the next lifetime giving him the home he so deserves while maniac ninjas calling themselves Akatsuki just don't exist.

Hey, maybe there is a dimension out there with exactly that scenario. Hmm. Maybe, just maybe, if he tweeks this thing enough, he could escape with Naruto...

“You are talking about Jiraiya-sama, aren’t you, Naruto?”, not-him asks dryly, and Iruka can almost hear 'is his perversion some sort of cross-dimensional constant’ by some weird form of telepathy that seems to stem from their mutual dislike of the man. Iruka is hopeful there is at least one world out there where Jiraiya doesn't bequeath Naruto his knowledge of 8000 Dirty Jokes.

Another sentence, another mouthful, “I'm traveling around with him and training.” Has he unlearned even the small amount of manners he had, he sighs to himself just as Sakura punches the blond in the arm for not swallowing his food first. (Was that a bone cracking? Surely that wasn't a bone cracking. No, Iruka is just going crazy.)

“I can't imagine how you got your mom to let you do that.”

What.

Iruka's mind comes to a screeching halt.

Naruto’s… mom. He breathes softly. What sort of cosmic dickery is this?! First Mom and Dad, now… is everyone alive there, in that parallel universe? His parents, Naruto's parents, maybe the Uchiha too?! Does anyone ever -

His eyes land on Kakashi's hands, and Iruka can see out of the corner of his eye how the man is sitting perfectly still next to him, looking like he is lazily slumped without a care, bowl already empty. (But his hands; Iruka spends a lot of time looking at those hands, in the churn of the mission room, and he is so weird for thinking this, but he is sure that Kakashi is tense from the way his hands rest on the table, fingers barely curled.)

Kakashi doesn't exist in not-him’s world.

(A changed variable?)

“Well, she couldn't.”, Iruka is jerked back to the present by Naruto's fake laugh, and resists the overwhelming urge to throw the boy over his shoulder and run away to the end of the earth, screaming at whatever gods and buddhas there may be, “They died when I was small.”

“Oh,” Ji-san blinks at them in surprise, a hint of a frown on his lips before his face falls. “I'm so sorry. I didn't think there was this much of a difference…”, he scratches his scar nervously, “But, then we grew up together with Mom and Dad right? After all, the Uzumakis and the Uminos are-”

Aw shit.

“No.”, Iruka whispers quickly, a hand flying to grasp his alternate's forearm. Please shut up, he thinks. We don't need or want to talk about this. “They died in the same attack on the village.”

But it's like Iruka's touch has burned him; his eyes flicker from Naruto to him in agitation, to Sakura who is small and quiet, to Kakashi who is silent and unmoving, pulling his arm away. “But… if… then who raised either of you?”, not-him’s face pales further when Iruka shrugs half-heartedly, and seems to whiten completely as he arrives at his next question, “Who became the vessel if all the adults were dead?”

Aw, shitty shit.

Iruka stands up, wanting to manhandle his utterly clueless other self out of the kitchen before he asks another question about things they just don't talk about, but Naruto sits back with a defiant sigh in his chair, looking at them straight on.

“They sealed it in me when I was born.”

Iruka stares. He feels not-him go absolutely frozen under his palms. The frickity frack is happening, he thinks as he sort of hears Sakura gasp loudly, his thoughts racing a mile a minute; he even sort of registers her hand coming to her mouth, staring at Naruto as though this is the first time she has truly seen him. (Iruka supposes this is true in a way.) The blond just holds her gaze - or rather, that’s the information his optic nerve is trying its hardest to transmit to that anxious tangle of nerves he normally calls his brain, but all he can think about is how much worse he fucked up with this stupid alternate self summoning seal affair than he thought, and how the mangled bodies of their fears and pains have been dragged into the goddamn light _during lunch._ It hurts.

He is snapped out of his trance when not-him jumps to his feet with a shout of rage, chair falling back against the ground loudly. He stares at them all in incomprehension and anger, grasping for words until he finally slams his fist down the table with a yell of, “Who the sweet ever loving fuck did that, a fucking baby?! A baby?! And you are telling me no one even fucking raised you?! What sort of shit - what kind of fucking - who the fuck am I going to have to kill -”

He can't find any good words for the situation; is there any, really? Was anyone at fault at all (that was still alive)? He thinks it's best if they let Ji-san blow off some steam right until his eyes land on Kakashi.

“You.”, he growls, “You are the goddamn variable.”

Iruka is pushing his alternate sharply away, standing between him and the jōnin before he knows what he is doing, like a chihuaha facing down a similiarly colored mastiff to protect his bernese mountain dog crush with his little googly eyes and yippy voice.

“Don't you dare pin this on Kakashi-san!”, he yells with much more anger than he thought he had, because fuck him, fuck him for having Mom and Dad, fuck him for Naruto's sake, fuck him for trampling right into this topic - “We didn’t get that lucky. Those were our cards, and you can fuck off if you think any one of us can be blamed - !”

Not-him grabs the front of his shirt faster than he has time to think, their foreheads clinking together where metal meets metal. He seethes, more quiet than he had expected, but also with more burning rage than he would have supposed. “He is the variable. So far, he is the only shinobi I do not recognize, and we’ve seen plenty on the way here. But if we are talking absence, let’s also talk about Kushina-sama’s students, or, for that matter, Minato-san’s. You can’t honestly expect me to believe Rin or Obito would just-”

Iruka is just about to pull back for a frustrated headbutt when Kakashi interjects, “That’s because they are dead.” He watches not-him’s eyes change from suspicious to comprehending, gaze focused over Iruka’s shoulder at the other man, the silence sudden and heavy around them as he goes on, “Obito died in the war, but it’s good to know there is at least one world out there where that didn’t happen.”

Not-him lets him go.

“You are the third. The boy who died in the cave.”, he mutters, “That’s why I don’t know you. You are dead.”

Shitty shitty shit.

Iruka can practically feel Kakashi's heart break in that twitch of his hand; he punches his other self so hard, he flies out of the kitchen, destroying the door. He lounges after him.

 

* * *

 

Iruka presses the cold pack more firmly against his lip, awkwardly flipping a page with his left hand. Sakura had taken care of most of the results of their… brawl, but he was too pissed off to wait until she was completely done, running off. Like the utter genius he is at dealing with such situations, he had done the completely reasonable thing, grabbed his favorite fuinjutsu book and hid himself away in the empty bathtub in his messed up uniform. He sealed off the door too, like all good emotionally stunted people do.

This situation had definitely given new meaning to the term self-hatred.

Maybe he should write a book. 'Umino Iruka's Guide to Completely Ruining Your Life - Face All Your Insecurities, Fears and Traumas With This One Simple Jutsu!’ Yeah, it'd be a total bestseller with the villain scene for sure, he’d make loads of money, could tour the land with a blond protege -

Wait. No, he doesn't want to be a pervert.

Okay, so maybe not a book. He could still hold lectures. 'The world-famous Umino-sensei presents the absolute method of setting your life painfully on fire! Now on TV!’ Yeah, that sounds more sophisticated. He’d travel from place to place, become rich -

“Iruka-sensei.”, Naruto's voice is strange through the door, laden with some kind of emotion he doesn't recognize, not through wood, “I’m going out for a bit.”

He doesn't answer, just turns the page. He’s had the whole thing memorized since he was thirteen, he is only doing it because you are supposed to, that's what books are for, right? Reading all night, turning the pages, forgetting stuff with, stuff like empty homes and bad test results, loneliness and a pointless life.

Yeah. Books are great. He loves books.

Books never betray you. They don't go running off with huge perverts touring the countryside, for example. (He huffs at himself. Take that back, that was not fair.) Or they don't hurl a giant shuriken at you. Yes, yes, a book would never do that. They would never go and sacrifice themselves for a village that later doesn't give a damn about you either. No, books are nice like that. They always keep you company, the ones on your shelf are your family, the ones in the familiar library your friends, and those in the massive central library are the delightful acquaintances you can't wait to know better.

Uh-hmm. Books never fail you.

They don't show up in your life as the shining examples of what you could have been, and they don't hurt the people you love by being inconsiderate and not taking a hint. No, they don't.

He wipes that stupid tear out of his eye. It wasn't a tear anyway. It was just rain or something.

(He looks out the window at the stupidly sunny weather, the few clouds left still not giving a damn.)

 

* * *

 

At around nine o’clock, Iruka quietly opens the door of the library - his second place of refuge, after Sakura had unceremoniously knocked down the bathroom’s door, yelling about ridiculous notions of purposeful use. Like hiding in the bathtub and lamenting your life wasn’t what bathrooms were made for. Preposterous. Anyway, even being the mediocre chunin he is, he had quickly assessed the lethality of the situation and hastily retreated to the safety of his makeshift bedroom, layering on a couple extra seals he had thus far in his life reserved for A-rank missions. (He hadn’t quite expected her training to have progressed so far under Tsunade-sama, to be honest. Visions of a pink-haired Rokudaime loom before his eyes, but he quickly dismisses them, because he promised in his heart that he would believe Naruto and his dream always, and Iruka is faithful to a fault.)

He looks left. Nothing. Yes, good.

He looks right. Also nothing. Excellent, excellent.

Everything seems quiet enough. Time to loot some dinner, then go back to angrily staring at a) the wall, b) his tattered volume of a Thousand Leaves of Autumn, a manual on Uzushio seals he inherited, and c) his stupid fingers that must have drawn something wrong to have summoned his ass of an alternative self. (Couldn’t he have summoned a nice version of himself? Like, maybe the kind grandpa one, who cooks well, encouraging him all the way? Or, like, a female version who gives warm hugs and smiles softly at Naruto? That would have been so much better, but, well, he messes up everything all the time, so naturally this resulted in the worst outcome as well.)

He makes his way in silence towards the kitchen, irked at how Hatake ManorTM had been furnished with all the tricks the Great Shinobi Book of Annoying Your Houseguests had to offer, even if that was circa thirty years ago. Creaking floorboards, irregular door heights, unexpected furnishings around the corners… He ought to bring his students here for stealth practice, because the Paranoia was strong in this one, even if upkeep has also kind of been… nonexistent. (Actually, this just makes things harder, because Iruka can either step on an obviously loud spot, or endanger his well-being by extreme proximity to that cobweb. Did he mention it was an empty cobweb? Meaning, the terror itself could drop down onto his head at any given moment? Just the thought of it happening is enough to make his soul start to slip out of his body.)

His arduous journey finds him flattened against the wall next to the kitchen door, watching the shadows dance across the hallway floor as the figures move about inside.

That’s just great. Now he has to turn around and starve to death.

“Are you absolutely sure about this?”, Naruto sighs, rattling about. He hears the gas click a couple of times before the fire lights up, and a pot is banged onto the hob.

He almost turns on his heels when he hears his alternative self snort, “No. But it’s all I can think of. I used to love this when I was small, you know.”, but as something splashes, curiosity - okay, and his remarkably empty stomach - gets the better of him. He doesn’t move.

“And you absolutely know how to do this?”, he can hear the spatula knocking against the bowl as something is stirred, “Because my Iruka-sensei can just about burn water.”

Oi. Absolutely uncalled for slander of his character! (Also absolutely true.)

“Don’t worry, andagi is one of the two foods in the world I can do without fail.” … Andagi? He blinks in surprise at the shadow of Naruto moving across the kitchen, memories resurfacing yet again. How he used to love his mother’s andagi when he was a child...! He would beg and beg and beg for it, like the spoiled little brat he was... He could never reproduce it, of course, and he hadn’t eaten an andagi like Mom’s ever since. “I just hope it’s enough for an apology.”

Oh.

Iruka clutches the front of his uniform in silence, gaze boring holes into the wood at his feet. There was no need to apologise to a person like him, was there? No, not really. Kakashi was the one who was owed an apology, although he wouldn’t be surprised if he would never want to see Iruka ever again, after all the things he has done. What an incredible idiot he is...! He should just escape, dig himself a nice grave, and just lie down there for the rest of eternity. In fact, if he dies and is reborn, he should just come back and lie down again as soon as he is able. Or maybe he could negotiate a punishment in one of the hot hells. No, no, he hates winter, it should be one of the cold hells, yes, definitely.

“It better be, old fart”, Naruto grumbles, and not-him gasps in theatrical pain just as the dough begins to fry with loud crackles, “He is my most treasured person, you know? But I get to spend so little time with him, now that I’m training, and I’m missing out on him because of your dumb old ass!”

It’s not like Iruka cries at everything. No, he is a strong man who unquestionably has no need to clap his own hand over his mouth and blink rapidly at the ceiling at these words. Pfft. He has a heart of stone, a will of fire, and positively dry eyes. Besides, it’s not like Naruto is _his_ most treasured person and he was utterly grief-stricken when he left. No, not at all. He most certainly hadn’t spent nights wondering if Sasuke has encompassed him wholly and truly, if he was relegated to a tiny spot in the boy’s heart, if he was just taken for granted. Of course not. Iruka is a strong, capable shinobi, who occasionally cries into his ice cream when reading classical poetry at midnight, but that’s only because poetry was _art_.

Resist Iruka. Resist the urge to run in there and hug. You can do it…!

“Sorry. I… I know I have a tendency to just bulldoze through people’s feelings when I’m angry.”, a wistful sigh, and he almost feels bad for not-him, emotional as he is at the moment, “I guess I’ve come to rely on my husband to hold me back. Oh Gai, if only you were here...”

Naruto’s stricken yell is wholly eclipsed by Iruka’s gargantuan holler of disbelief, sliding into the kitchen from his hiding place with a barely articulated, “What?! GAI?!”, holding onto the doorframe for dear life.

Not-him takes in their ashen visages before shrugging nonchalantly, holding out to him a plate of hot andagi. “He’s the love of my life.”

(Naruto falls to the ground, and Iruka is inclined to follow his example.)

 

* * *

 

Iruka should stop stuffing his face with andagi right now, or he is going to be absolutely sick in the morning. As well as fat, but that’s less of a concern, seeing as he will probably die within the week or so, being a criminal and all that. (He’s finally decided on which photo Naruto should use at his funeral, so he feels a little better about it.) Okay, maybe one more, just one… one small, tiny… one delicious, just-like-Mom’s… one perfect little andagi.

“You are going to spend the night hurling, Iruka-chan.”, not-him raises his head minutely to look at him from where he is laying on his back on the engawa, hands behind his head, the moon shining down on them softly. Naruto is sleeping next to him, his legs thrown over the alternate hokage’s stomach, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

“Yeah, and it’s going to be your damn fault.”, Iruka mumbles at him, mouth half full, trying to wrestle some form of self-control back onto himself. (It’s not going well, that battle. These things were fucking delicious and also highly addictive. He might as well resign himself to a dad-bod.) He kicks at the air, feet hanging off the edge, like some schoolboy.

The other him chuckles, but his face falls quickly. “I… I didn't want to hurt you. I didn't really think… I hadn't even considered the possibility that our lives had turned out so different. What could it have even been, that one thing that changed it all? Was it Kakashi-san’s death, or was it something before? I… it's frightening, to think that every decision could birth an alternate version of reality.”

Not-him, Ji-san him, suddenly looks older than before; he imagines it’s the weight of decisions and failed missions, the fate of a village resting on his shoulders, the regrets that grow heavier as one rises in rank that push down on him. He could never do it; doesn’t even like to lead as a chunin, always uncomfortable with taking a superior role. He doesn't want the responsibility of making the wrong decision for someone else.

“It’s comforting too.”, Iruka says, putting the plate down as far away from himself as he can, “There is always a place where things turned out for the better.”

“I guess.”, Ji-san sighs, craning his neck to look at him. There is a moment of melancholic silence before a devilish smile spreads across his lips, “You have a crush on Kakashi, don’t you, Iruka-chan?”

Iruka splutters, willing his face not to go beet-red. Maybe he should just hurl as a distraction.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been having a difficult few months, and my updating and writing schedule has gone from tentative to non-existant as a consequence. Still, thank you to everyone who left a kudos and commented! It meant a lot! (Who's crying reading them? Me? No. Really. These are just patented anime rain droplets sliding down my face. Honest.)
> 
> No-one won the husband lottery though! Ah well, don't feel bad! There is an alternative universe out there for everyone! <3 
> 
> Andagi is an Okinawan desert. I saw some time ago a headcanon on tumblr where Iruka was Okinawan, and the thought stuck.


	4. Every ending is a new beginning, maybe

It’s barely dawn.

Kakashi sits up in his grandparents’ old bedroom, staring at the wall. He recalls how it looked when he was a child; it’s a hollow shell now, unlived in, sorrowful. (It makes him nostalgic.) He presses a palm against Obito’s sharingan dully aching in his eye socket, (it feels like it has a will of its own, wants to pop out and leave him), and debates shortly with himself the merit of asking Sakura for some pain killers. Maybe this forced break from training will help it ease up on its own. (Maybe it’s okay, maybe he has time.)

He rises, puts on some of his gear; there are plenty of weapons hidden about should the need arise. (Fifty-five, he recalls, counts them again in his head.) His grandfather used to inspect them every morning, (the smell of coffee sticking to his clothes), and Kakashi would follow him around, soaking up all the attention he was given (‘You’re a very good boy, Kakashi.’).

He feels disjointed here.

Without really thinking about it, he finds himself under his grandmother’s plum tree. (‘Isn’t it lovely, Kakashi?’) She adored it, he remembers. His grandfather made that bench for her (he liked carpenting), so she could sit under it even if her bones ached. (He hadn’t forgotten them drinking tea here and admiring the blossoms in the early spring. Their dogs lay about their feet.)

He sits down. Wishes it was early spring, instead of autumn. Autumn makes him think about the other wing, about the room with the ghost of ruined tatami (and maybe someone else). It’s not that it makes him… (he blinks, watches a single red leaf dance about in the wind, thinks the universe likes cruel jokes)… it’s just that… He wishes Tsunade would have picked someplace else, somewhere he doesn’t have to think about his anger, that hot coal in the depth of his heart, burning through him.

He unclenches his jaw willfully.

People probably think it makes him sad. That it makes him cry. Well, maybe he did, once. (He doesn’t remember.) But all he knows now of his father’s death is rage. Rage at his father for leaving him; rage at the village for shunning his father so; rage at himself for not saving his father; rage at the world.

He breathes, closing his eye against the ugly colors of dawn splattered onto the clouds haphazardly.

There are footsteps by the kitchen. (His grandmother never cooked after his grandfather died. They held her funeral a month after his, his father holding his hand so tightly.) When he looks up, he finds Iruka coming towards him with a tray, gentle steam rising from the kettle.

Oh.

The brain is a fickle thing, Kakashi knows. It is wont to make strange associations without his knowledge, bind for example Iruka, whom he has no right knowing, with that of comfort and ease - even if all he has been given by the other has been kind smiles and one or two meals at Ichiraku. (If Kakashi was lightening, volatile, destructive and dangerous to everything he touched, then Iruka was the moss in the depths of the forest, a calm healing soothe for wounds, a warm start to fires on cold nights, a savior on the verge of hunger.) Maybe Iruka is just naturally the type of person whose company makes Kakashi’s shoulders relax a little. Interestingly, this attribute was not present in that strange alternate self. No, that Iruka was… wrong. Too brash. (Married to someone else. Kissing someone else. Fucking someone else. The vehemence of his jealousy had surprised him the night before last, exploding from those mutters of a husband.) And… no one had ever punched someone for Kakashi. Not in a situation that didn’t really need punching. (It was always him doing it anyway, it was expected, and he didn’t mind.) It made him unable to sleep all night, the feeling of Iruka doing that for him.

“May I join you?”, Iruka asks softly as he comes to a stop in front of him. Kakashi nods in silence, follows with his one good eye the measured movements; listening to the tea flow, inhaling its fragrance, savoring the cup’s warmth in his hand. It is his favorite tea, the one he drank yesterday morning, but one of the many he asked the kids to buy. He’s glad Iruka noticed. 

Iruka looks exhausted. His hair is messy, and his uniform is askew; he wonders if he has been working late again, if he was perhaps up all night. He surveys the scar on Iruka’s left hand out of habit, gaze lingering on the barely visible line from index finger to wrist.

(In the middle of the night, Kakashi often thinks of all the things he’d love to do with those hands on his skin. But those thoughts have no business leaving the bed, or seeing the light of day.)

“Thank you for the tea.”, his voice is rough from disuse; he clears his throat. Iruka smiles at him, before dropping his gaze to the ground nervously.

“I…”, he bites his lip, head swaying a little, “I wanted to apologise for all of this. It’s an astounding mess.” 

He shrugs a little, smiling slightly at the other even if he may not see it underneath his mask. “As the old proverb says, shit happens. Don’t worry. We'll all live.”

Iruka snorts in amusement. “For a little while more, at least.”, he huffs, and Kakashi is relieved to find his shoulders drop a little. He smiles mischievously after taking a sip, “This tea is wonderful for being hot leaf juice.”

It takes Kakashi a slow second, but he'll blame it on the early hour. 

“You come into my house.”, he deadpans, and the smile Iruka gives him warms him more deeply than the tea, contagiously spreading across his own face. “And say such vile things about the most superior of hot beverages.”

“I’m sorry, but hot leaf juice cannot even compare to the drink of the gods, which is coffee. This is a well-established fact, and the basis of all jutsu.”

He wants to reply darkly, but the effect is probably ruined by his snort at the end, “Especially fuinjutsu, eh?” 

Iruka pouts comically at him, and Kakashi laughs; it makes him feel light and safe and _okay_ , like the world isn’t quite as cruel and bloodthirsty and wrathful as it was just a little bit ago, and his jaw doesn’t quite tense up as it did before. They enjoy the remainder of the sunrise, soft and miraculous, together in comfortable silence.

\---

They spend most of the morning drawing up the complicated set of seals in the flat courtyard of the Hatake estate with an incredibly neon orange paint Naruto managed to bring them from... somewhere. Iruka has a suspicion the boy still maintains little hidey holes from his prankster days, despite having sworn he had never ever done such a thing, _Iruka-sensei, I just always find what I need on hand_. (Yeah right. Like Iruka doesn’t have copious amounts of paint, rope and glue tucked away still in various parts of the village.)

(Not that he ever uses it, really. Honestly, that time with Anko, or Genma's unfortunate incident, those experiments had nothing to do with him.)

(Did he say experiments? He meant accidents.)

“Ah.”, is all Kakashi says when he sees the masterwork now decorating his home, and Iruka feels just slightly bad when he looks at his quarter of a face full of regret. He would have gone with blue, but Naruto insisted. He sits down on the engawa next to where the other stands to take a minute, because boy howdy, is his head beginning to spin from the paint fumes and the glare of the neon combined. 

(Now that he has looked up, he is most disappointed to see that Ji-san had disappeared yet again. He stopped being surprised at about number four of his variously excused vanishing acts, mind you, most of which had resulted in Iruka finding him horsing around with Naruto. They are probably playing sugoroku or something, and he will have to kick his stupid alternative self in the head, hog-tie him, and drag him back, because the gods and buddhas as his witness it was the so-called hokage’s idea to enlarge and multiply his original design by fivefold, and he will not be doing it alone.)

“Sorry. I’ll clean up afterwards.”, he says with a nervous smile, hoping there is no paint on his face. There probably is, let’s be honest. Because sure, this morning’s tea-apology went surprisingly well, but this is still his cursed life we are talking about, and the man next to him is his sort-of denied crush.

To his total surprise, Kakashi sits down next to him, movements fluid and measured; he’d always envied his grace. “I never knew before this that you were a fuinjutsu expert. You are quite something, Iruka-sensei.”

Iruka blushes, turning his face away as his heart flutters in his chest. (Oh no oh no oh no. He isn’t just funny, he is also so very nice.) “I’m not really… I mean, an expert would have probably not gotten into… this…”, he gestures at the orange horror before them lamely to denote the whirlwind of bad luck and general insanity that has been the past couple of days.

“Many great techniques start out as accidents. Although, I think this will be destroyed as completely as possible - who knows what continous use could do the fabric of the universe…”, and here he looks at Iruka with the one lone eye like he knows that it pins him to the spot, “But I have a hard time imagining that it’s serving its intended purpose, Iruka-sensei…”

Oh shit. He jumps a little, and knows his face did the thing it does when someone catches him at something embarrassing and he was in now way prepared for it, a sort of ghostly white expression paired with biting his lips, and he attempts to scootch away as smoothly as possible. His opponent is a jonin, so he probably needs a good five paces before making a run for it -

Kakashi grabs the back of his shirt.

Iruka is instantly, pathetically doomed. (Damn you Kotetsu! He is so going to haunt him once he is executed!) Sure, he is never washing this uniform for the rest of his life - which is at best two weeks tops -, but it’s absolutely horrific how he has to suppresses a whimper as he feels himself being pulled back.

“Now, now”, Kakashi chuckles, and the sound resonates in Iruka’s head like a magnificent genjutsu melody, “you can’t slip out of my grip that easily.”

(Don’t think about his hands, don’t think about the word grip, look at your toes, look at your toes. Definitely ignore his hand still holding on to the fabric of your top. You can do this Iruka, you are a survivor.)

“I-I promised not to tell, Kakashi-sensei.”, maybe the gods, the buddhas and Kakashi will have some mercy at his sort of nervous but truthful reply. (A quick glance at the clouds reveals they still do not hold much compassion for his affairs. Damn it.)

“You can whisper it in my ear, if you want.”

Fuck.

He is goner. Iruka is gone. Done for. He is destroyed. Annihilated. He shall now cease to exist, leaving this earthly shell behind, his soul slipping away to wander aimlessly through the six cycles of rebirth. Maybe he’ll be a worm.

“Please, Iruka-sensei. I want to know why my eyesight has to suffer this much orange.”

Iruka hides his face behind his hands with a loud groan of defeat. Kotetsu deserved this anyway. “It was supposed to be a ‘bubble’. Like Ki no Masahida describes in the Thousand Leaves of Autumn, how a copy of a place can be inserted into a temporarily running seal to trick the opponent… an artificial genjutsu. Except, it wasn’t meant to trap… it was… ah…”, he peeks out from behind his fingers for a second at his audience’s bewildered quarter of face, takes a deep breath, and tries to say as fast as humanly possible, “Kotetsu wanted a romantic getaway to propose to Izumo, but they couldn’t afford to go to Whirpool country like he planned because his father just died and all his savings had to go to the funeral, so I said like the idiot I am that wouldn’t it be great if we could bring the place here, and he said what do you mean Iruka, and I said have you ever heard of a bubble, it’s really cool, and he said please please Iruka do it for me, I love him so much it has to be perfect and I don’t want to wait until mom dies, and I said I couldn’t possibly take out the trap part, and he said of course you can I believe in you, you are my only hope, please I want my mom to be at my wedding if my dad can’t, and I was so touched I didn’t even protest even though I should have because the trap is a fundamental part of the whole thing, but I couldn’t give up because they are in love and it’s sweet and I wish my parents could be there at my wedding if I ever have one, which I won’t because I’ll probably be executed after all this is over, and I’m regretting and not regretting this whole thing happening.”

(He is sort of winded at the end, and has to take a couple of deep breaths.)

“No one will execute you”, Kakashi says softly once Iruka has stopped gasping for air, “The Godaime wouldn’t-”, but his sentence is cut off by the ruckus of Naruto bursting out from the kitchen, running for what appears to be dear life with something in his mouth from Sakura, which is all well and good except the paint isn’t quite dry yet and they are messing up all of this morning’s hard work in the process. 

Iruka screams at them like he hasn’t in years.

\---

After giving Naruto a somewhat nostalgic dressing-down for ruining stuff recklessly, Iruka summons The Whip© - he got it when the boy was in third grade, quipping about him being an absolute slave driver like those in the ancient Middle Kingdom -, and proceeds to stand around cracking it for an hour while the deeply respected alternative hokage and the orange ball of energy labor on his designs. Life is good for a short while, yes.

“Why do you still have that…?”, Naruto mutters darkly, clothes incredibly stained. He throws the brush down into the bucket, dropping down onto the engawa and giving it an unwanted fresh coat of paint.

Not-him groans like the old man he is as he gingerly sits down. “I have no doubts in my mind, Iruka-chan, that you’d make an excellent Rokudaime with your work ethics.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere.”, Iruka replies absentmindedly, putting the weapon away and turning around to survey the seal. Would him activating it alone provide enough chakra? They had multiplied parts of the design, but… 

Perhaps drawn out by the lack of moans and shouted orders, Sakura and Kakashi appear around the corner (with refreshments, which is greatly appreciated, this isn’t an easy job you know!). They enjoy some good barley tea and some chilled watermelon before Ji-san gets to his feet with an air of finality and marches over to the summoning spot.

“I miss my husband, so let’s do this, Iruka-chan,” he yells across the courtyard, and amends after a moment, “Also, I have a village to run.” 

Iruka feels a little nauseous, but that could be the mental image of Ji-san getting hot and heavy with Gai-sensei or doing important paperwork messily, he isn’t sure which one. Both seem equally terrible, although the latter more so. (Gai-sensei is probably the type of husband who buys you flowers when you are having a bad day and massages your feet when you are tired. He can be forgiven for having bad taste in men.) So he takes a deep breath, clamps down on his anxious thoughts that this is far from perfect, molds the chakra, and presses his palms to the ground, ignoring Naruto’s cheering shouts from behind him.

The seals glow an eerie blue and fizzle, and he knows instantly that they’ve messed up. Fortunately, his alternative self hadn’t made hokage out of pure luck or by the power of his pretty face, and he leaps out from the circle before Iruka even manages to shout ‘jump!’. Their intricate work explodes with dazzling orange sparks, dust and dirt flying everywhere, caught by the wind and blown into their faces.

“I’ll be a good boy, honest.”, Ji-san coughs next to him, “Please don’t kill me with elaborate sealwork.”

“Look!”, Sakura gasps behind them, pointing to the newly formed hole in the middle of the yard, and they all turn to stare. Iruka personally thinks he is going to faint, clapping himself on the cheeks. This can’t be happening. This is not happening. This is a genjutsu, or a nightmare, or something. Yeah, he’s probably finally gone crazy, and is hallucinating everything.

“Who are you people?”, the woman with a single long scar across her nose narrows her eyes at them, kunai held defensively in front of her. She is wearing a plain white apron on top of her blacks, as though she was just lifted from her kitchen. (Maybe he is now at fault for ruining an alternative village and a lunch. His sins just keep growing.)

Naruto whoops loudly. “Iruka-sensei! You're a really pretty lady!”

Iruka sinks slowly down on the ground; maybe it will swallow him up if he concentrates hard enough. Yes, maybe the earth will be merciful towards him. He's read that those southern barbarians believe in a mother earth goddess after all, so maybe she can take pity on his ever downward spiral of luck and absolve him from this comedy of errors, now that the buddhas and kamis have all but forsaken him.

He hears Ji-san clap his hands together in delight as though in a ridiculous, drug-induced dream, bellowing “Welcome to an alternate reality!” as he jumps to his feet, throwing his arms wide open with a grin. “I’m also Iruka from another plane of existence, and the guy sobbing on the ground is the Iruka belonging here.”

(He isn't sobbing. His mouth is just open in a perpetual silent scream of anguish.)

“What…?”, female Iruka says (Iruka absurdly hopes she can now be Iruka-chan, and he can at least be Iruka-kun, and _how did his life end up here_ ), taking first the sealwork, then them in.

Somewhere above him, Kakashi sniffs once and mutters, “Let's be gentle now. She is pregnant.”

Iruka begins to bang his head against the ground in a slow rhythm as his soul slowly leaves his body.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Will Ji-san ever get home to do his paperwork ~~and his husband~~? Will Iruka-chan's tomatoes survive his long absence from home? What secrets does this new Iruka hide behind her apron?


	5. So happy together (me and you, and you and me)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finally, somebody other than our Iruka proves to be proactive in solving problems.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, did you know that the fifth Tokugawa shogun was nicknamed the dog shogun because of the animal protection laws he instituted?

Absurdly, they sit down and have tea in the kitchen, like Iruka summoning yet another alternate self is just something that happens on Wednesdays. Like he doesn’t want to run back home and hide under his bed from the sheer impossibility of this happening twice, and/or the fact he still has no idea how to fix this goddamn mess and no one seems to believe him about it. Tea!

Female!Iruka seems at least appropriately distraught at the idea of what happened.

“Listen, you’re all very sweet, but I must be honest. I haven’t totally discredited the theory that this is a strange genjutsu trap, or that I’ve gone insane.”, she sips her tea quietly, glancing quickly at Kakashi by the counters as he opens a packet of crackers. Wouldn’t that be nice, Iruka thinks from where he is standing by the fridge, a nice genjutsu trap, or a padded room even. Yes, he could make the padded room work, he is totally behind on sleep anyway.

“I know it’s weird, Iruka-ah…”, Naruto furrows his brows, sliding further down as he rests his elbows on the table, “... sensei? San? Man, I was confused enough with Ji-san here.”, he ignores not-him’s loud bellow of a protest, “But I promise it’s real. And confusing.” 

Iruka watches her bite her lip with a peculiar expression, one he feels more than knows is a mix of anxiety, worry and hilarity. She’s pretty, he thinks, wide hips and warm eyes, a face that reminds him strongly of Mom. He wonders how different her life is to his. (With his luck in interdimensional fate lottery, she is a hunter nin captain or something.)

“Alright. Let’s say it is real; I’d still like to go home as fast as possible...”, female!Iruka says almost apologetically. She doesn't need to finish her sentence, now that they can all see the small bump of her stomach behind her apron, which quite honestly is still short circuiting Iruka’s brain.

Because that definitely tops being a hokage, or a hunter-nin, or anything at all. It’s everything Iruka has ever wanted since he was twelve and crying alone in his empty home. (A Family. His knuckles are turning white from where he grips his mug. This… this is just not fair. It’s like the universe has decided to throw every conceivable failing he has right into his face for a laugh.) 

“Believe me, Iruka-san, I’d also like nothing more than to return to my own village. That I’m supposed to be protecting. Governing. Whatever. I’m a hokage.”, Ji-san shrugs his shoulders in fake humility, and Iruka feels his eyes roll heavenwards on autopilot before his brain catches up to his ears. 

“Hey.”, he hears himself protest like some petulant child, “Why does she get to be Iruka-san?”

His first summon snorts. “Don’t be ridiculous, Iruka-chan. She is not only a female shinobi of Konoha, but is a mother to a new generation, so she deserves our respect. You, on the other hand, are a ball of nervous energy who has twice managed to pull off a ridiculous feat of sealing as an accident, and also barely has plants.”

“Ooo, burn.”, Naruto cackles, and Iruka shoots him a betrayed look as he hangs his head in shame at this answer. “Want some ice for that, Iruka-sensei?”

Iruka-san (he admits to calling her most grudgingly Iruka-san), looks at him in delight at that word. “You also teach? Academy?”, and smiles widely when he nods back, looking pointedly at the blond boy munching loudly on the crackers now served, “An absolute terror?”

“Unrivaled.”, he finds himself answering with a smile of his own, turning to a real laugh at Naruto’s befuddled squinty-eyed face that turns to them.

“You taphin’ ‘bout me?”

“No.”, he and Iruka-san answer simultaneously, and without meaning to lift their cups to drink in perfect synchronization, faces carefully blank. Sakura giggles at them.

\---

Kakashi had been… mildly surprised at the turn the events had taken. He wouldn’t have been particularly shocked if the first attempt at returning the older Iruka to his own plane of existence failed; that was almost a given with new techniques. But to repeat the summoning…? And to summon two at once, technically…? 

To be frank, he is a little worried about (his) Iruka. (He blushes at the thought of that word, ‘his’, a word he has no business thinking, but it is getting increasingly difficult to differentiate between the various Irukas now prancing about the estate.)

(He thinks about this new female Iruka, about her cautious gaze and silent steps, somehow still wrong, still lacking something despite being easy on the eyes. He wonders what that something is, why is it that only (his) Iruka is capable of soothing his frayed nerves with his presence.)

Summons require chakra; the bigger and more complicated the being or the tool, the more it sucks out of you, sometimes continuously. He’s been tempted to take a look with his Sharingan, but the pain has not subsided at all, leaving him with jolts in his eye socket that make even the thought of lifting his headband a nauseous affair. He just hopes the two (and a half?) summons don’t drain him. If they do, then they just might have added a timer to his mission. (A mission he has no way of moving forward. Oh, curse his twelve year old self, sneering at the Yondaime’s offers of teaching him advanced fuinjutsu!)

He paces the hallway silently, back and forth from his current bedroom to the library, feet remembering each step from those childhood years running around and playing hide and seek with his grandfather. (He called it intruder detection and infiltration practice to have Kakashi agree to it, but it really was just hide and seek, he thinks with a fond smile.)

Should he request help from the Godaime? Surely there were other fuinjutsu experts within Konoha who could be trusted to keep quiet of this. (He knows his request would be denied at the current state of things; Iruka is tired, sure, but he isn’t in danger - not yet. It’s just that this not yet has Kakashi on edge, and the thought of seeing the one person who has inadvertently become his beacon of… normalcy be struck by something he can’t fight or fix has him as tense as four S-Classes back to back.)

He needs some tea, he decides, and heads towards the kitchen, giving only a cursory glance to Sakura and Naruto taking lessons from the older Iruka in the messy, vehemently orange courtyard. At least they are getting a kick and some training out of this. He is not sure his grandfather in the afterlife is approving of the redecoration though. (He’ll burn some nice incense for him on the weekend.)

Kakashi opens the kitchen door.

There is a traditional wood stove in the far corner, the one his grandmother used to cook on, even though his father had modern appliances installed and had begged her to use those. (She hadn’t listened (naturally), and continued to cook on the tiled kamado, convinced that nothing tasted half as good if it wasn’t done on it (and Kakashi was inclined to agree).) Because this was a shinobi household since time immemorial and open flames weren’t allowed to be easily accessible to any potential enemies, it has a hidden switch to disengage the jutsu quelling any spark.

(He’s half forgotten about it himself.)

So Kakashi feels his heart stop when he sees female Iruka reaching without hesitation around to let the fire be started, and the flames flicker to life.

If -

Consequently -

Than that means, he thinks, looking at her round belly, and promptly faints. 

(Some time probably passes here.)

“Kakashi-sensei!”, he thinks that’s Sakura’s voice yelling angrily at him, but everything is far too hazy still to be sure. Slowly, he registers that his upper body is leaning against something soft… no, someone soft, and when he blearily opens his one good eye, he finds Iruka (his Iruka) staring down at him in concern, arms wrapped around his midriff.

(A part of him wants to stay in that moment forever.)

Iruka must have caught him as he collapsed. (Hitting his head would have been a real nuisance.)

“You should have said something!”, Sakura continues chiding him, one hand above the sharingan, healing jutsu cool against the ache, the other perched professionally on his wrist and taking his pulse. “Your chakra is so unaligned, it’s a wonder you can even walk!”

(Huh. Well. That explains the searing headache of the past few days.)

“Hmm.”, he replies intelligently, trying not to think about how he is sprawled against the object of his affections in a mortifying mess. (What was he doing again, before?) His eye lands on Iruka-san, kneeling next to Sakura with a worried expression on her face, and he feels his vision blur and his breath hitch as his last thoughts resurface.

She knows this kitchen. The only reason for her to do that is because she lives here: seeing as she is likewise an academy teacher it can be assumed that the timeline of her dimension isn’t too different, and that he himself is also alive. And if they both live here, that probably means they are married, or dating - and if they are married or dating then that that child in her belly… that child is his. Well, alternative his. (He still screams internally.) There is a universe out there where Iruka and him are married and having a family, and he is getting so very woozy again and does that mean Iruka-san makes alternative him salt-broiled saury after S-ranks and wow is he jealous about that or what -

“Hey, hey. Stay with us now.”, (his) Iruka says above him, his arms around Kakashi involuntarily tightening as he does so, and he looks up at that familiar, lovely face, tries to focus as much as he can, but his chin falls back down.

(A dream that seemed unattainable like the stars had suddenly fallen within an arm’s reach, he realizes groggily.)

“Honestly.”, Sakura grumbles, letting go of his wrist and soothing some of his hair out of his face gingerly, “You have to stop doing this.”

(He can’t. Not with the promise of another war behind his eyelids, not with Naruto in danger, not with Jiraiya old, not with Sasuke being groomed by a psychopath. He doesn’t have the option of stopping.)

“Iruka-sensei, please accompany him to his room. Carry him, if he tries to make a run for it. I have to report this to Tsunade-sensei.”, Kakashi makes a move to protest the notion of being carried or helped, but a sharp look that promises broken bones and week-long hospital visits stops him in his tracks, and he relents. (He is smart enough to know when to give up against both the Godaime and her star pupil. Kakashi is a genius after all.) “Can you make him a plate of something salty? And an orange or the like -”

He doesn’t really pay much attention to Iruka-san shooing Sakura away, mostly because he can’t, senses still scrambled, limbs feeling heavy and unusable. What little energy he has is spent focusing instead on not becoming a tomato as (his) Iruka helps him up with a soft smile on his lips. By the time they make it to his room, he is almost well enough to stand alone again, but… well… he is only human, and he doesn’t want Iruka to let go of his waist just yet. (Just one more stolen minute, that’s all he wants.)

“Here we go.”, Iruka smiles, sliding open the door deftly with his foot, and helping him towards the bed. 

Kakashi sinks down almost bonelessly, head aching. He wishes Iruka would stay, but his throat is constricted and nothing else comes out but a strained “Thank you.”

(He shouldn't be hoping. There is no reason for him to stay, because they barely speak, barely know each other, aside from that short time from before when Naruto pulled them both towards himself, like a sun demanding that all revolve around it until it's suddenly gone, off chasing its own black hole.)

Iruka opens his mouth to say something just as a loud thud can be heard from the direction of the library, followed by a long 'Iruka-senseiiiii’ from Naruto, and his face darkens.

“You should see what that was. I'll be fine.”, he manages to grind out, not daring to look up anymore. He watches his feet instead, waits out the hesitation that's broken by another thud, and watches him turn around and leave through the door.

Kakashi lays down gingerly, and tries not to think about the warm tingle of where Iruka had touched him moments before.

\---

 

He isn't sure how much time passes before his door slides open again, revealing female Iruka with a tray laden with something that smells delicious.

She smiles at him almost mischievously.

“I've brought you something to eat, as instructed by the resident medi-nin. I should also warn you that said medi-nin is adamant I should hit you on the head if you try to walk around.”

Kakashi allows himself a frustrated groan as he struggles to sit up. Sakura could be a little over-protective of him as a patient, as he has come to find out. 

He jumps when... Iruka-san puts the tray down in front of him.

“I took an educated guess that you might favor salt-broiled saury. The orange afterwards is mandatory, I'm afraid.”, she sits down carefully next to his futon, one hand on her stomach, and the gesture makes Kakashi forget that he is hungry after all.

He signs, _father_ , and points at himself.

Iruka-san blinks at him in surprise, before signing back, _affirmative, lover, three years_. That makes Kakashi blink rapidly in astonishment, and she points at him questioningly.

_Negative_ , he gestures. _Alone_.

She looks around, gaze lingering in the direction of the other wing. _Father_ , then tentatively, like a question, _dead_.

He nods. Afraid to continue but unable to resist, his hands move almost of their own accord; _father, alive?_

The affirmative of her hand motions makes his good eye prickle. Fuck, he thinks, what a lucky bastard that alternative him is. They stare at each other, unsure, until he drops his gaze. “Thank you for the food. It looks delicious.” He doesn’t really feel like he has it in him to eat with high speed, holding the chopsticks lamely in the air for minute before realizing that, well, she has already seen a face rather similar to his… and, ah, more.

She looks a little surprised as he pulls his mask down, but smiles softly at him. “You are different from the Kakashi I know.”, he smiles around the first bite of fish; it's absolutely heavenly, “That man is a spoiled brat through and through.”, and he almost chokes in his surprise.

(But… if he really thinks about it… about the sort of child he was, ordering his father around… Yes, his father wasn’t that different from his grandparents when it came to giving in to his every whim and fancy. His genius little boy got whatever he demanded, the apple of his eye, the treasure left behind by his late wife.)

“But, you know”, Iruka-san continues fondly, “he always manages to find a way to cheer me up, and I don’t think there is anyone else out there who listens as well as he does. Despite his penchant for adopting stray dogs and fooling around with Gai, I’ve come to find him a very reliable person. I’m sure you are likewise steadfast, just without a growing number of puppies yapping about at your ankle.”

(Kakashi tries not to look too sheepish. He might not _keep_ the puppies, but he never leaves them there, all alone, afraid and hurt and abandoned. Or the older dogs, or the ugly dogs. Or, one time, a wolf by accident.)

“You take them to the Inuzuka’s, don’t you.”, Iruka-san says dryly, somehow having read his mind. He nods in defeat, and she laughs. “You’ll go down as the ‘dog hokage’, mark my words.”

“That would be a veritable disaster, me leading anything.”, he remarks bitterly between new bites of delicious fish. A comfortable silence falls over them this time, Kakashi eating, almost devouring his early lunch, and Iruka-san watching him quietly, resting her swollen ankles.

This time, she waits until he has swallowed his last bite of rice before innocently saying, “Ah, how should I say... well, your Iruka…?”, and she gestures, _target_ and _lover_ , and this time Kakashi does go full tomato in the face. Iruka-san smiles that wicked woman smile, nodding to herself. “Thought so.”

“Please don’t-”, he tries to begin, but she just points at the orange on his tray. He begins to obediently peel it, with the sinking notion that alternate him is probably somewhat… whipped, might be the right word. 

\---

The light in the study begins to flicker, like he is living in some cheap horror flick. 

Iruka stares gloomily up at it, trying to figure out if he is going blind or the storm outside is just messing with the old cables or something. Either way, he can’t see his text properly for real this time, not just because of it all sort of swimming together. (Exhaustion? What exhaustion? It’s not like he has barely slept maybe six hours the last, uh, couple of days. Nooooo.)

His companions, all taking refuge in the only room with a TV and more or less good light from the raging rain, are likewise not fond of this turn of events. Kakashi, - still strictly on bed rest, or else as per foreboding instructions -, sighs almost silently at Iruka’s elbow, and he turns to see the man put his Icha Icha on his face with a defeated gesture. Iruka wishes he could do the same with one of his books, and just close his eyes and pretend every crazy turn of events away. Yes, he could just take a nap, and wake up to find that it is still a nice quiet Sunday afternoon, and his biggest problem would be getting ink on his face again from an unfinished project he dozed off on. That would be nice, although he would feel bad for dreaming up the part where he got to talk to Kakashi over tea and sunrise, or carrying him to his room or... 

“Naruto”, Sakura pinches her lips together across the table where she is playing go with Iruka-san while discussing baby names, “this better not be a stupid prank.”

If Iruka would know Naruto less, he’d find the idea absurd. As it is, he just gives the blond goofball sitting in front of the ancient TV a hard sidelong glance, because he does not want a repeat of the Spooky Haunted Classroom Incident that involved gratuitous amounts of toilet paper, several creative misuses of the bunshin jutsu and Shikamaru's shadow jutsu, and so, so many spiders. (A quick look across the table at his female summon revels that that particular Armageddon had been a cross-universe constant scarring them both for life.) 

The boy just whines loudly, “Why would I do this?”, pointing to the television going to static like it’s the end of the goddamn world and everything is meaningless and desolate now that he can’t watch animated boobs jiggle around while some sword fighting scene happens. Iruka tends to forget that the boy is going through puberty until moments like this happen, and then he really needs to scrub his brain free of the image of his little Naruto peeping through onsen walls like that goddamn pervert, tongue lolling like some dog, and ugh would someone just wipe his mind already. He looks back up at the light, still flickering like it's a championship and it won't be outdone.

Ji-san puts down his knitting with a huff.

(Iruka is just… he doesn’t even.... he just can’t process the fact his first alternative self a) knows how to knit, b) apparently does so as a hobby, and is c) actually good at it, judging by the scarf that has begun to slowly but surely emerge. It’s… it’s frog patterned, he thinks.)

“If you start bickering, I will haul your asses outside for taijutsu training, so help me.”, the most honored hokage throws both teenagers dark looks that do prove very effective in instantly subduing them. Maybe he does know a thing or two about leadership, Iruka muses.

The lights go out for a long moment.

Sakura screams.

Iruka is half-terrified that Naruto groped her breasts on the way to total pervert damnation, or has dropped another toilet-paper spider-bomb on the room - in which case he is done with life and will lay here until whatever buddha or bodhisattva comes for his soul -, but realizes that she is pointing at the TV. Everyone else is already half-crouched with kunais in hand, except for him and his groggy sleep-deprived brain apparently, which has decided to screw any survival tactics it has learned and just conserve energy.

A figure-like dent is emerging out of the screen, slowly pushing out against the glass like some horror creature, making everyone else back up and away (Iruka-san is pulling on his elbow, trying to get him to leave his comfortably settled-in spot at the table, and good luck to her on that. Iruka would rather be devoured by whatever that thing is than to lift any of his limbs.)

“Please go away.”, he says to the shape with all the unperturbed zen of someone either extremely drunk, powerful or exhausted. He is sadly only one of those things. The shape… actually seems to stop and consider his request, until Sakura throws a book at it in panic. It bounces off with a hollow clunk. The thing continues to struggle against its confines.

Iruka sighs. Maybe if he asks nicely, he can get eaten first.

The blob finally breaks through some sort of barrier and a human hand emerges from the tv with a squelch, a splint vambrace covering it. It pats the tatami in front of it as though trying to find a grip; then a second arm shoots out, the two bracing together for the great big wet pop of an upper body pushing through, messy silver hair obscuring the bowed-down face.

“The hell?! Is this your seal thing, Iruka-sensei?!”, Naruto screams in panic as the figure - a man - climbs out of the television with a grunt of someone having squeezed themselves through a very tiny space, landing not so gracefully in front of the rickety TV that has gone back to being static, minus the rope stretching out of it tied around his waist. 

Before Iruka can answer with an 'I wish’, however, the man lifts his head. He has a mask and only one open eye, the other covered with a medical patch, and two short swords on his back above a Konoha vest.

A second of absolute silence falls over the room.

“Iru-”

“You moron!”, Iruka-san screams, throwing another book with incredible precision at the other Kakashi on the floor whose head it hits loudly, stomping over to stand in front of him, “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?! I could have miscarried!”

(“I'd like everyone to please stop throwing my books now.”, Iruka mutters. It was quite rude, really.)

“Sorry”, the man on the floor replies almost automatically, rubbing his head as he shifts to a kneeling position with his heels propped up, and he could laugh at his rather formal posture paired with an almost whining tone, (he thinks alternative Kakashi might be pouting, to be totally honest), “I was preoccupied with the whole interdimensional travel thing. You know, to rescue you, after you suddenly disappeared in the middle of a sentence, cooking.”

Ji-san laughs in delight at the scene, clapping his hands together as he looks at Iruka-san with a cheeky grin. “You are getting rescued! I wish my husband could do that!”

Wait, what…?

Iruka squints, gaze shifting to Naruto and Sakura at the other side of the table, gaping and yelling in incredulity. He blinks. Looks to Ji-san for guidance, uncomprehending, who pets his head like he would a small child’s, while Iruka-san looks at him apologetically, putting his books back on the table.

Eh…?

Not-their Kakashi stands up in a graceful, fluid motion reminiscent of their Kakashi, turning to his wife. “I’ll be honest. I was not expecting”, here he gestures toward them all vaguely, “this to be the reason. Whatever this is.”

Meanwhile, Iruka’s thought process is still lagging considerably. Husband, yes, spouse, aha… Iruka-san’s husband…. the person whom Iruka-san is married to… is… her dimension’s... Kakashi…? “Holy shit.”, he mutters, and he’d probably blush profusely if he wasn’t so damn tired. A slow turn of his head towards their Kakashi reveals no surprise on the quarter of a face, just a rather stoic expression, and his brain decides to log that information for later processing.

“Iruka-chan had made some errors during the development of a seal.”, his second summon says in a tone much akin to his mother’s when he made a mistake she wasn’t mad about, and she pats his head. He could get used to this new fad of people gently petting his head, actually. “It was just a mistake. Well… a repeated mistake…”, she gestures toward Ji-san behind her, who gives a little wave.

Alternative Kakashi stares first at the multitude of Irukas, then briefly at their Kakashi who has managed to prop himself up without Sakura noticing, then at the teenagers still gawking like their birthdays have come early and he was the best present ever. Finally, his good eye lands again on Iruka; he scratches his head. “I guess that answers that hypothetical.”, he begins solemnly, “I’d still sleep with you if you were man, honey.”

He instantly gets punched in the thigh by Iruka-san, groaning loudly. Iruka is not sure if he should feel complimented or not and decides to think about it later, after his hopeful infusion of caffeine.

“I'm afraid you married an idiot.”, their Kakashi sighs, cupping his cheek as he leans his elbow on the table. He is considerably more pale and more haggard then his newly arrived counterpart. 

Iruka-san puffs her cheeks - it's really quite adorable -, giving her husband a scathing look as she answers. “He just enjoys embarrassing me.”

Alternative Kakashi smiles back at her, and even though half his face is covered it’s clearly full of adoration; Iruka can’t even fathom how he manages to sound so bored as he says, “True, it’s one of my four hobbies. I also enjoy reading the Icha Icha series, training with Gai, and walking to the Academy together with you.”

To-

His brain practically fizzles at the words. 

Together.

His seal design flashes before his eyes, so wrong, so, so wrong, and he slaps his fists on the table, yelling, “The chakra should have been transmuted together!”, scrambling with hitherto unbeknownst energy for his plans in the corner of the room, and shit is he an idiot that’s why it didn’t work, (probably saying that part out loud), and then looking for his damned pen that he can’t find until he gives up and fishes another out of his satchel, unfolding his gigantic schema with a flourish and instantly beginning to correct his idiotic design, maybe - sort of - okay definitely quietly screaming all the while.

(“Wow. Your alternative version has a bit of a mad scientist vibe. That’s hot. Ow.”)

Damn it, he forgot the book that deals with this in the kitchen hall when he caught Kakashi!

“Fuck! My reference book!”, and with that, he sprints out of the library, possibly with some tears of frustration in his eyes.


	6. Leaving the nest

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who commented, left kudos and read this insanity so far! I promise to reply to you soon, and hope you enjoy this new, somewhat less funny installment.

“Um,” the older Iruka gets to his feet hesitantly, gathering up the abandoned schemata and folding it quickly but carefully, putting it on the desk, “I’m going to go after him.”

Kakashi wishes he could go as well, worried as he is about the effects the seal may have, but a quick glance at Sakura and her murderous gaze at him reveals that this is not a plan he should commit to if he wishes to remain among the living. He sighs, frustrated, watching the first summon leave as he sinks back down. (But what worries him even more is that nobody else seems to be noticing how (his) Iruka has begun to spiral downwards to chakra exhaustion. Or is it only him who recognizes half-manic episodes as such?)

“It’s been fun,” other him… Bakashi, he decides, turns mostly to the kids, (and is this vehemently bizarre feeling of seeing yourself from the outside coupled with the knowledge that it is not you but also you what Iruka has been going through this whole time? It is awful.) “But it’s time for us to go.”

“No, please!”, Naruto pleads dramatically and loudly, “Just let us enjoy the illusion it worked for a little longer!”

(‘Worked’? What worked?)

His alternate self gives the children a flat look, crossing his arms, and his vambrace rattles with the motion; it’s such a familiar but forgotten sound, it makes Kakashi’s own eye hurt. He thinks of the two tanto on his back and remembers what his father thought about the white chakra blazing out of them, and has to clench his jaw to keep himself from screaming. He wants to look away.

“Please don’t tell me your genin attempts at matchmaking are multi-verse constants. Please. It was enough that we had to suffer through it.”

His consciousness empties itself instantly at this sentence. The word matchmaking echoes like a most efficient mantra in his head. (matchmakingmatchmakingmatchmaking) There… had been no matchmaking, he tells himself, but the tiniest sliver of doubt worms itself in as Naruto practically wails, throwing himself onto the tatami with a reasonable thud while muttering something about family and ramen. Sakura pats his blond head in a vague attempt at comforting him. “We were incredibly unsuccessful.”, she tells them dryly, before turning to him with an apologetic smile.

Kakashi can only blink back in confusion at this revelation. (Sure, there were some dinners at Ichiraku that Naruto had dragged them both to, or that time he insisted they all go fishing, or spending the summer festival together… and that time they somehow managed to lock them both in the supply closet, circumstances of which he still hasn’t managed to -)

Oh. 

(He feels touched at his little team’s attempts, even if it was ultimately a failure. Their taste in proper, suitable men for someone inherently good like Iruka was also questionable, yet he still wishes he could go back in time and ruffle their hair.)

“By the sage, I’m an idiot.”, Bakashi claps himself on the cheek, “How did you not realize this?”

Kakashi bristles, snapping out of his meditative state, and wills his cheeks not to burn. He counters darkly and idiotically, “Shut up.” He regrets speaking immediately, especially with how it makes Iruka-san bite her lip in quiet amusement.

(How do you properly argue with yourself out loud? He wants to leave.)

His other self’s face goes carefully blank. He wonders what this means in the small silence that settles over the room, just before he flickers out of sight; his speed seems incredible to his own deteriorated state. He doesn’t even have time to pull a kunai, not with how sluggish he still is, before the other appears next to him and-

“You are allowed to be happy!”, Bakashi wraps him in his arms, but its vice-like strength makes it feel more of a wrestling move than an embrace. He struggles against it in vain.

(“Kakashi!”, Iruka-san reprimands somewhere outside his immediate haze.)

“S-stop!”, he tries to protest, but all he achieves is getting his head pushed into the shoulder of his alternate self.

“You deserve love, you buffon!”

(Ridiculous.)

“Let me - let me go-”

“I know we had a tough start, but you have to let yourself off the hook. You can’t go around carrying all this by yourself. You have to let people in, you coward!”, Bakashi whispers furiously into his hair.

The door slides open loudly.

(His) Iruka stands there, drenched, it seems, to the bone, one rather soggy book in hand, looking somewhere between murderous and euphoric.

Kakashi’s face is definitely doing a tomato now.

\---

Finally, yesyesyes, where is his schemata he can finish this - wait what. Iruka forgets what he was doing again as his eyes land on Kakashi getting bear-hugged by that other, little bit more healthy looking Kakashi. (His flush is adorable. It is, and somewhere in the back of his mind there is a thought of wouldn’t it be great if _he_ could make Kakashi flush like that in many, many different scenarios, and - .) So okay, he is standing there like some fool, trying to process the sight with those two struggling brain cells still on duty inside his skull and not currently working on generating fantasy material.

It’s not like he was doing anything important.

“Ah. What's happening there…?”, Ji-san comes to stand next to him, and arm snaking around his like he needs help staying upright. Now that he thinks about it, he just might. There are two Kakashis embracing right in front of him, after all.

Naruto snickers from the other side of the room, face mischievous and Iruka could swear he had a fox tail in that one second.

“... therapy?”, Sakura seems to be fighting her own smile at the sight, until their Kakashi does the best thing Iruka has ever seen him do: try to pull his mask up right to his forehead. Buddhas, gods and bodhisattvas help him, he is going to be a dead man from the cute unless he gets this whole thing fixed right now and can kiss the man silly before getting executed by the Godaime. (He is dead either way, so any residual embarrassment at attack-snogging is soon to be moot.) He turns towards the table with his schemata.

“Don't you dare move.”, Iruka's eyes snap to his female counterpart at her menacing tone, his project forgotten for a whole moment. “Hold him.”

Hold who, he thinks blearily right until he finds two strong hands grasping his wrists, his arms held above his head by not-him. Are they trying to take away his book?! Is this the attack, nay, the rebellion of his clones, er, summons?! He looks back at the traitorous Iruka-san, whose hands have just finished running through some jutsu, inhaling deeply and no doubt about to spit some heinous death at him, like a fireball or something, and he'll end up like those fried fish on sticks at festivals; he tries to quickly think of his last words.

(‘Ramen isn’t my favorite I just enjoy being with you Naruto’? ‘Curse thee’? ‘I enjoy poetry readings, I confess’?)

A gush of warm air blows at him from her mouth, warming his rapidly chilling skin and taking his hair tie with it.

Oh. Right. The rain.

“Honestly Iruka-chan.”, Ji-san lets go of his wrists, “Have you not learned dad's umbrella technique?”

Iruka blinks, combing through his now messy blow-dried hair with one hand while inspecting his now exquisitely frazzled book. Good thing this is just his backup copy, and the nice one is in his safe. “Thanks?”

“How could you let him run around in the rain? Useless hokage!”, Iruka-san stands akimbo, looking rather cross with Ji-san, who splutters in indignation. He ignores them, leafing quickly through his manual to chapter 8, section 2, subsection 2 so he can get back down to the business of setting up the chakras to transmute together because that should stabilize, provided he does it correctly, the -

The other, strange Kakashi laughs, getting to his feet with the grace of a large predatory cat, deadly elegance behind each movement. “We should go, honey.”

Oh! Iruka has all but forgotten about the television and it's cross-dimensional portal use. Are all television sets capable of this, he wonders, thinks with horror about the possibility of Ji-san climbing out at the middle of the night from his own to snore into his ear loudly and promptly decides to throw it in the trash and only keep books as entertainment. It is simply not worth the risk.

“Nooo….”, Naruto cries softly, blond head snuggling against his teammate's shoulder, who is strangely forgiving of the action. “Iruka-san cooks way better than Sakura-chan!”

Iruka ignores the (rather deserved) beatings in order to focus a little more on the kaleidoscope of black and white spots that had begun to fill up his vision. Pretty, but distracting, he thinks, quickly kneeling down next to the desk. Hopefully nobody else noticed his newest little problem, and he can finally work on what needs to be done, finish this thing and send everyone home, have a nice big last supper, take a bath, and get beheaded in peace. Good plan. Great plan. Wait, he had a bit about kissing Kakashi in there… that should, ah, definitely come after the bath...

\---

“I guess… well, this may be goodbye..”, Iruka-san says hurriedly, her face twisted with concern at (his) Iruka's faintness. Kakashi is sure in that moment that his worries had crossed her mind as well, that she is just as keenly aware that her presence might endanger him as he is. They are quite similar in that way, it seems.

(Maybe he'll miss her.)

His gaze drops when she moves towards the television set, lifting his worn book as though to read, eyes tracing the lines of kanji uncomprehending instead; maybe it’s enough to know that somewhere out there, there is a universe where things turned out better. Where his father is alive, where he is still a spoiled brat, where he is in love; a universe where he knows what happy is. A universe filled with baby rooms and warm kamado and salt-broiled saury just for him.

(Except it’s not really enough, is it?)

There is a hollow clunk of glass, and Kakashi looks up to see Iruka-san knocking on the TV. “I guess that won’t work after all.”, she sighs, moves over when Bakashi thrusts his arm in experimentally - it goes through without a problem -, and allows him to try again while holding her hand, only to fail.

“She may be tied to Iruka-sensei’s chakra; she was summoned, after all.”, he gestures towards his sharingan at his other moronic self, (tries not to let his words ring in his ears anymore), who lifts his eyepatch obediently, hanging his head with a soft ‘dammit’ a moment later; that’s all the confirmation Kakashi needs. He quells the sparks of panic that they are on a timer after all, glancing at (his) rather pale Iruka before pinching the bridge of his nose as he tries to think.

(If Iruka-san could have went home, that would have helped so much. (His) Iruka was doing well with only the alternative hokage to support, if a little shaky.)

“You should go.”, Iruka-san turns to Bakashi, “I don’t know how you got this open, but I imagine it is limited in time. We’ll figure this out.”

“I’ll be back in five days if you don’t.”

Kakashi looks away as they kiss, resolutely not looking straight at (his) Iruka, who opens the schemata with a flourish and begins to draw. He hopes this will be all over by then.

(He couldn’t bear to see Bakashi again.)

\---

The next day, Iruka jerks awake on top of his plans.

“Shit.”, he scrambles off the paper, notes with disdain that he has managed to drool on top of his work (again), and thanks whatever god may still be looking out for him that he regularly saves his progress via the global information tracking seal that replicates his work to his scroll at home. The TV is silent in the other side of the room, like it hadn’t just spit out a fully formed person yesterday, and he uses the reflection to try and slick his hair back into shape before looking at the clock above.

Four AM. Cool. Coolcoolcool, he’s only been asleep for four hours. That’s not too bad. Basically a power nap. He still has plenty of time to redraw the whole thing on the courtyard before breakfast, and send everyone home so he can get killed in peace. Alternatively, just lay down and wait for death’s sweet embrace. 

Yeeeeeeeah.

Good plan. Great plan.

No barfing, he tells himself as he makes his way outside. Not even if you really feel like it.

\---

“So… we all put chakra in it? That was what your together thing was yesterday?”, Ji-san looks at him skeptically at the edge of the whole thing. Iruka nods, wiping his hand in his orange spotted uniform as he makes his way over.

“Yes, because you see if-”

“Nope. Don’t care. Still weapons specialist. Still won’t understand a word.”, not-him waves his hand dismissively, grabbing onto Iruka’s elbow when he teeters a bit to the side. So rude, but also kinda nice. Iruka breathes in deeply, and repeats the no barfing mantra in his head. “Had you slept at all?”

“Four hours. I dreamt I was a librarian at a university in the capital, and everything was horribly out of order.”

“Great. I hope that’s not the next guy you pull out.”

Wow, rude. He gives the old man a withering glare, or something he hopes comes close to it in his current, not 100% there state. He even thinks about taking out his whip again, but decides that would be way too much effort right now, especially considering the fact that he now has a chance to just sit down and do nothing.

Yes. Blissful, he thinks as he stretches out on the engawa while his first summon is off to gather everyone else; just listening to the birds sing and call, defending their territory and whatnot. And maybe he really has gone somewhat crazy because he has a half-assed mental image of a bird talking like a yakuza who is warning you from entering his hood or something at that. He snickers to himself.

“You are so weird.”, Naruto leans over him, making a face. “And very orange.”

“You like orange.”

“If this doesn’t work, I’m getting Sakura-chan to put you on bedrest, Iruka-sensei.”, the boy pouts, sitting down next to Iruka and leaning against him. He’s kinda touched but tries his hardest not to slump against him, even when it is so damn tempting right now. Just… leaning… and falling asleep. Yes, a good, long sleep… He smiles back lopsidedly, ruffling the blond locks while Naruto pretends he doesn’t like it, muttering, “I’m worried, seriously.”

Aw. What the hell, he shrugs, and presses a kiss into the blond locks. He might as well, seeing how he is super duper dead by the end of all this. Why not blow everything up, right? Go out with an amazing bang of fireworks. “I wanted to adopt you so much. But by the time I worked up the nerve”, he sways a bit too far to the side, and Naruto has to pull him back by his shirt, “you were gone. I’ll always regret it.”

“O-Okay. Definitely bed rest.”, his voice cracks again and it makes Iruka so wistful, the little twerp always shouting and getting into trouble in his class finally reaching puberty, inhaling massive amounts of food, growing lanky, soft little beard and moustache-to-bes appearing on his baby skin. Did Jiraiya teach him to shave yet? Dammit, he is missing all of it, all of the little moments he told himself he could still have, even if he didn’t show Naruto the stack of forms he’d already filled out. That’s just not fair.

Before he can actually wail about it like the huge sob he is though, the others arrive, mostly looking cross at the early hour. Except for Kakashi, who just looks cross that Sakura keeps tutting over him. Or just simply cross with the whole situation. Probably cross with Iruka, period. Sigh.

Iruka-san presses a sealed envelope into his hand. “Just in case this works, read it after.”, she instructs him strictly with a devilish smile, and Iruka obediently tucks it into his hidden shirt pocket. He wonders what it is that she wants to tell him after she’s gone for about two seconds, his train of thought interrupted by Ji-san dragging him up hurriedly.

“Come on, Iruka-chan. I want to kiss my husband too!”

“Let’s not talk about that, I’m already nauseous.”, Iruka mutters, to which he receives a slap on the back of his head. They settle down at the edge of the sealwork, share a look between them, and place their palms on the ground, channeling chakra.

His creation buzzes with power, pulsing for a couple of beats before it crackles like electricity; it should be good, it’s going well, they’re establishing the - the middle begins to glow, and he bites back a curse just as a beam of light shoots out, magnificent and breathtaking in its varied colors, snaking about hesitantly in the air until it settles down back in the middle... and forms a brand new figure.

“Great. It finally happened. I’m having a nervous breakdown. Or a hallucination? Whatever, temporary insanity.”, this new Iruka mutters once the light has died down, taking a swing of the mug in his hand. “Let’s get this over with quickly, I have a lot of things to do today and this is going to mess up my schedule real bad.”

Iruka blinks, quite literally forgetting his growing nausea at the sight of this brand new mistake he just made. He can’t even really find the mental capacity to freak out about it, because… well... probably the same reason everyone else seems likewise unable to word their fascinated surprise/confusion/incomprehension; this new Iruka, while undoubtedly having Iruka’s height, and face, and voice is… uh… there is a whole lot about him that is just not making much sense. He has no shinobi gear on for starters, just that strange ensemble - Iruka thinks he might have seen one or two similar outfits on the trip to the capital once, but that was like, gosh, ten years ago at least (and wow is he getting old) -; black pants, edges sharp, and a collared white shirt with a long black tie (he thinks it’s called a tie) hanging from his neck. So, it’s weird. But not the weirdest. No, the weirdest, most unsettling thing is that he has no scar across his face, and his hair is short.

(He reaches up to his face to feel the bump of the scar without thinking about it, and looks to Iruka-san to see she is doing the same. They jump a little.)

“Well?”, impatient new Iruka says, shifting his shoulder as he fumbles with the strap of his rectangular, heavy-looking bag. “I still need to go shopping, grade these tests, cook dinner, prepare Naruto’s bento for tomorrow and actually wash some clothes and I need to iron some shirts too and do I have enough nori…”

Weird Iruka seems to be lost in deep thought for a minute, which is precisely when Naruto decides to stand up and say (in a really sweet hopeful voice), “Bento? For not-me me?”

This… makes things worse. 

By a lot, because new Iruka screams at the top of his lungs, taking several steps backwards before incredulously yelling, “Naruto?! Why are you so tall?! What? What?!”, while sort of brandishing that mug at them in a laughably untrained manner. His gaze jumps between them, intermittently staring at Naruto who raises his hands in a gesture akin to those used to calm wild animals. Apparently, several versions of himself was okay, but this isn’t, and Iruka has to squint in confusion as to why.

“I wouldn’t necessarily call him tall.”, Sakura quips to the side, which does nothing to calm weird Iruka’s freak out and everything to bring Naruto down on his hands and knees in a depressed dark aura. Iruka would love to comfort the teenager that it’s not true, but his parents hadn’t raised a liar (outside of missions). He can hear Kakashi sigh deeply from where he sits on the engawa, wrapped in the blanket as menacingly advised by a certain individual.

“You… are not a shinobi at all, are you?”, Ji-san finally manages to form a coherent sentence, and their new counterpart turns sharply towards him.

“Shi-shinobi?”, he blinks, then laughs in a very hollow manner, shaking his head, “Wow, I should not have had that leftover for lunch, that was way off. Shinobi, god, what am I, nine? No, I’m a high school teacher.”

“I think he’s from a universe without chakra or shinobi as we know it.”, Kakashi says, raising his voice a bit so they’d turn towards him. “He’s basically chakra-dead.”

“Hey!”, weird new Iruka protests, raising his mug yet again as he points at Kakashi, “Strange person whom I’m hallucinating! Who are you calling dead? I’ll have you know I got six hours of sleep last night! Six whole peaceful hours! But then I woke up, like a responsible adult, on time.”

Okay, well, that was as long as his distraction lasted. Iruka takes a deep breath against the growing sense of nausea, palms sweaty against the ground.

“You are not hallucinating.”, Iruka-san stands up next to him, approaching their brand-new counterpart slowly, “You are in an alternate universe, by accident, but it’s going to be okay, I promise.”

Somewhere behind him, Kakashi just might have said his name. Iruka isn’t sure, because his vision has come to be filled again with those pretty black and white spots instead of anything useful. His ears also ring so, so annoyingly, and he is actually glad when someone - he thinks it might be Naruto, because it feels like he is shouting his name in his ear, despite it obviously being out of commission - maneuvers him to lay on the hard ground. 

Then it’s just all black.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please welcome our new, and last, guest! Also, this chapter contained a shout-out to the fic [Sweet](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17926247/chapters/42329312) by AuntieKuroNeko, who seems to share my love for Kakashi or Iruka calling on monks, buddhas, bodhisattvas or other kami applicable to the situation.
> 
> (Bonus horrible material that I had to get out of my system, wherein local man tries to get his son married but succeeds in only causing embarrassment:)  
> 
> 
> (Spoilers: she does. Eventually.)


	7. Yeet... uh, yote... yought?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you once again to everyone who liked the fic! We are almost at the end~

Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

Kakashi watches, dumbstruck, as Iruka goes limp in Naruto’s arms, his breath stolen from his lungs. Has he miscalculated? Should he not have allowed another attempt? He is on his feet before he knows it, hovering on the edge of the circle created by Sakura, the first summon and Naruto, hesitant and afraid for what seems like the first time in a very, very long time.

“His chakra depletion is enormous.”, Sakura shakes her head, “I guess he really is holding all three of you here with continuous use.”

Iruka-san curses softly next to him, and he turns to see her holding the newest version of Iruka firmly by his bicep. Her mouth mirrors the anxious line of his own, and they share a look.

“We could channel chakra back into him.”, the older Iruka places his hands on the nape of Iruka’s neck carefully; he’s seen some of his hunter-nin colleagues be able to siphon chakra out delicately through the points there. It stands to reason that a hokage-level version of Iruka could push chakra in, without upsetting Iruka’s natural flow too much.

“Stop!”, female Iruka cries, and from the hiss of the newest member, tightens her grip in anxiety, “We have no clue how our chakras would react to each other. If anyone is lending any, it should be someone from here, like Naruto.”

“He can only bulldoze in! That could send him into shock!”

“Time out.”, Kakashi squares his shoulders, stepping closer and effectively quelling the panic setting in, “Let’s move him inside and deliberate our options; ensuring proper chakra is only a solution for the effect, not the cause of this problem. Naruto and Sakura, you go get Tsunade, as fast as you can. We’ll come up with a plan by then.” 

\---

Iruka looks ghastly pale. Kakashi stares at him from where he stands by the TV, listening to the unfolding argument between older Iruka and Iruka-san, watches like a hawk new, incredibly strange Iruka lean over and gingerly brush some of those stray hairs out of his face. Neither of them are sadly fuinjutsu specialists, which makes the problem he is deliberating more simple and difficult at the same time. 

The problem being: do they need backup?

Tsunade is obviously reluctant to expose this idea and technique to a wider circle than necessary. Fuinjutsu specialists in particular are a fickle bunch, always toying and toiling in secret, and many of them never forget a creative solution once they’ve seen it. No amount of classification can erase the idea from their heads.

(Well… memories can be erased, but… he doubts Tsunade would risk the sanity of a specialist so lightly.)

“Can… can someone explain to me what that thing was outside and… generally what is going on?”, the newest member of their troupe asks after a frustrated quiet has settled over them. Older Iruka sighs, scratching his head as he crouches down in the farthest corner, probably settling in to think.

“You were summoned. That thing outside is how, the shapes sort of… give instructions on what should happen when, and all that.”

If they don’t receive back up, they need to figure Iruka’s seal-work out themselves. Kakashi himself is a strong intermediate, he could probably grasp the general idea behind it; sage knows there are plenty of reference books around them to look up anything he doesn’t quite understand. He could probably do it, with a little help from the other two Iruka’s to emulate how (his) Iruka thinks. The problem is time, time he isn’t sure they have, not until Tsunade gets here and not with a constant headache behind his eyes.

“Instructions to what?”

“The universe, basically.”, Iruka-san shrugs, beginning to pace back and forth in front of him.

New, strange, chakra dead Iruka gasps loudly, and they all turn to look at his unmarred face alit with understanding. “You are reprogramming reality? It’s a programming language? Because if that’s what it is, have I got news for you about what I teach and do!”, he grins, pulling a rectangular metal something out of his bag that he folds apart. It has a screen and keys like the computers in the corner of the mission room, except those have monitors as big as the television behind him and large whirring boxes on the ground with clunky loud things attached. He doesn’t really like them all that much, mostly because he has no idea how they work.

They stare back, uncomprehending.

“Programming…? Computer science...?”, he squints at them, “I write code, just not one that messes with alternate universes. Kind of like this guy, I guess.”

By the sage. Kakashi looks to the two other Irukas, and they share an excited look. Nevermind that this chakra-dead version seems to have come from a world with strange technology; if he can comprehend, fast, what Iruka has been working on, and correct it...

“I think we should give a crash course on fuinjutsu to… ah…”, older Iruka trails off hesitantly.

Their newest guest and Kakashi’s glimmer of hope frowns at the confusion. “Just... call me Mirai.”

\---

Tsunade stabilizes Iruka, and the news that he’ll be relatively fine are like a boulder rolling off his chest. Half the problem, she scolds them all angrily, was simple, physical exhaustion, something that several hours of sleep will take care of; he squashes his feelings of guilt at not noticing how little rest Iruka has been getting, continuing to breeze through elementary forms of seals with Mirai.

He can berate himself after this is over and his head had finally split in two from the pain.

\---

Iruka doesn't particularly remember how he's ended up in this futon, to be absolutely and totally honest. Maybe he just… materialized here, or something. Eh, who cares anyway, the point is that it's just the right amount of soft and hard, cozy and chilly, making him a blissfully boneless pile of half-asleep goo. He sighs to himself, nuzzling the pillow under his head. Can he stay like this forever, like, pretty please? He’ll be a very good boy, promise. No pranks, no incidents and accidents, and absolutely no fuinjutsu. Oh. Frick frack.

He scrunches up his face, unwilling to open his eyes.

No. No, his brain should go away now. He doesn’t need a recap of the Horrible No Good Week, not of Ji-san and his strength and hokage-ness and lack of orphanhood, or his absolute failure in summoning a pregnant Iruka-san who is -

Wait.

Iruka-san is married to her Kakashi. She is Married. To. Kakashi. SHE IS PREGNANT.

Now, he doesn’t exactly scream, but… well, he’ll admit to yelping while strangling out the word ‘married’. And pulling his blanket right over his head, just as his face begins to burn, because by the Sage she is married and pregnant and both of those things have to do with not-Kakashi Kakashi, and how on earth will he ever look at Kakashi again without spontaneously combusting on the spot from the sheer embarrassment and does this count as a sexual assault somehow?!

“Wow. That took only… thirty-four hours.”

Oh no.

Iruka blinks in horror at the inside of his blanket, as the terrifying realization dawns on him that he wasn’t alone in the room at all. No, no, no, who had the brilliant idea to make Kakashi sleep next to him?! Who could be so cruel?! (A quick overview of the suspects reveals that all but one are probably capable of this act of torture.) He peeks out in absolute mortification at the figure of his still-very-much-denied-thank-you crush leaning on his elbow, still mostly sprawled under his own set of duvets and blankets, trying to place his pager back above his pillow with a grunt. The early morning light barely illuminates the study around them.

He shouldn’t have skimmed on the donations to the temples and shrines. It was not worth it, becoming the King of Budgeting only to be so karmically retributed.

“I’m so sorry.”, Iruka whispers from behind his covers again, “About… that.”

He can feel the other tugging on his blankets, and he whimpers at the cruelty. How can anyone expect him to look him in the eye and live? Oh, maybe Kakashi wants to give him a stern talking to, or declare how much of a detestable and horrible person he is, or just strangle him. Well, okay, that last one isn’t likely, but he isn’t taking it off the table just yet. His entire face is so hot you could fry an egg on it, and he stares like a deer in headlights when the cover slips out of his grip and he is exposed to his brutal and unyielding fate.

Kakashi shakes his head at him sleepily. He… doesn’t look angry. Maybe…. no, worried is ridiculous. Iruka doesn’t merit worry, not when he did so many things that hurt him (bringing him here, Ji-san’s idiocy, Iruka-san’s marriage), not when his seal did not do what it was supposed to yet again, and he's ended up with the weirdest version of himself yet. (Uh, that is, if that wasn't a hallucination. He is, like, 70% sure it was real.) “How are you feeling?”

“Absolutely mortified.”, he admits softly, trying to pull the blanket back up again and averting his gaze. He is surprised at the quiet huff of laughter that follows; it makes him feel a little better that at least one of them can laugh about it. He looks back, going as always for that sweet, sweet spot in staring that is just shy of creepy and maximizes his ability to etch the moment into his memory. “What about you?”

“I’m not sure if this medicine is making this better or worse, to be honest with you.”

Iruka can definitely believe that. Even in the dim light, there is no mistaking the circle under that lone eye, or the slow, gentle movements of someone in pain. He has half a mind to just throw the man over his shoulder, rank and everything be damned, and jog back to Konoha hospital with him, instead of making him suffer in this decrypt old estate filled with cobwebs and possibly ghosts. “Do you need anything? I can -”, he is halfway to sitting up when a strong hand reaches over to quickly push him back down.

(He kind of struggles. Like, minisculely, and just gives up with the uncomfortable realization that jōnin were, as the old chūnin wisdom says, a different species of animal altogether who could snap you in half on a whim. Kakashi, apparently, could hold him down and probably up and sideways and whichever direction he fancied even with his chakra severely misaligned and suffering from terrible headaches. ~~Gosh that is hot, why does he find that hot, what is wrong with him?~~ ) 

“You’ve been out cold for the last day from exhaustion, Iruka-sensei. There is no way you are back on your feet in any way today.”

He opens his mouth to argue, but even the sight of Kakashi half-leaning over him does horrifying things to his insides, not to mention his brain and ability to speak, so he just ends up nodding. What a disaster he is. Ugh, just let him go back to reading poetry and romance novels, he is doing so, so bad here. Maybe he should change the topic to something vastly different, but also comfortable so he can appear like not a huge mess. Yeah.

“Have you ever been yeeted into the landing mats at the academy?”

Wow brain, real smooth. Way to out himself as a total weirdo and absolute garbage can on fire.

Kakashi laughs in surprise; Iruka had never really heard him laugh before, but he finds himself absolutely smitten with it. It's deep and quiet and sort of wheezy, like he is trying to hold himself back a little. “I graduated after a couple of months, so I never had the chance to be… yought.”

Oh, that's sad. His students always have the most fun when he hurls them into the mats, giggling and laughing and begging him to do it again. Don't tell anyone, but sometimes, when everyone has went home and he's had a bad day, he jumps into the soft landing cubes at the end of the somersault strip and lets himself bounce around.

“I'm told by several trustworthy sources that I excel in the art of throwing people into soft surfaces. I can hook you up with some wonderful yeets.”

Kakashi just might be smiling at him in the dim light, and it makes his heart throb faster. Sadly, he is also moving away and laying back down, making Iruka instantly miss that small, palm-sized contact and think about how he could try and get up again to make it return, like some masochistic fool.

“Are you implying that my chakra pathways might realign if I'm thrown about enough?”

“Hey, if it's good enough for the vestibular system and the proprioception…”

Kakashi hums, and Iruka is reminded yet again that he could listen to that just about forever. “Try to get a bit more rest until breakfast. I'm sure your newest guest has quite a few questions for you by now.”

Ugh. So it wasn't a hallucination after all. 

Dammit.

\----

Iruka’s mouth is literally watering. Like, he can feel his mouth overdoing it on the saliva front at the sight of all the food Iruka-san and Sakura are bringing in to the study. His stomach is so incredibly empty and looking forward to this breakfast, that even that tiny part of him that would protest at bringing food in here is quickly tied up and thrown off a cliff, never to be seen again.

Naruto snickers next to him, taking a bowl of rice and impishly holding it under his nose, only to pull it quickly away. 

“Don’t play with the food.”, his female version reprimands, mostly on autopilot it seems, immediately capturing Iruka’s attention with a bowl of hot miso soup. 

Well, mostly until the door slides open loudly, and he is pointed at (how rude).

“You!”, weird Iruka seethes, and is that Iruka’s schemata in his other hand? He narrows his eyes, trying to remember where he left it and to figure out why a chakra-dead version of himself would even have it, totally unmindful of his newest not-himself stomping over to him. That is, right up until he puts his foot squarely in the middle of his chest and pushes him to the ground, at which point he hits his head with a quiet thump on the tatami and blinks up at his own unscarred face in bewilderment. “Why isn’t your code commented?!”

Ji-san grabs one arm of his assailant. “Mirai! Be gentle with him!”

Uh, what? (His chakra-dead version is named Mirai?)

“S-sorry?”, he tries in confusion.

“I said, why isn’t your stupid code,” and here ‘Mirai’ shakes his probably still drooled on plans, “commented? Not only did I have to learn this stupid nonsensical language, but I had to spend half the night trying to figure out what the hell each part was meant to do. How is anyone supposed to continue or understand what you did if you don’t comment your damn code?!”

Iruka isn’t really sure why his seal-work is called code all of a sudden, or where he should have commented it, but not-him looks certainly pissed off with him. He grabs the ankle on his chest slowly out of a habit of self-preservation.

“I always work alone and don’t need to…?”, he tries, pushing the foot off so he can sit back up. Miraculously, he is allowed to do so. On the other hand, he does receive a slap to the back of his head.

(Iruka-san sighs that motherly disappointed sigh, shaking her head. She is going to be a great mom.)

“Bad shinobi programmer! If you are writing functions to alter reality, at least have the decency to leave some remarks about it! You are explaining this mess after breakfast.”

That… that might be a valid point, Iruka concedes.

\---

Iruka blinks at the strange, unscarred face across him in astonishment. Despite not being a shinobi and absolutely chakra dead, - and surviving mostly on caffeine, which has to be incredibly unhealthy -, this newest not-him gets it. Like, he needed to explain some terms that he would translate into other terms that Iruka found strange, like statements and loops and whatnot, but he understands.

He has managed to summon actual, real help.

He looks up to the clouds, cheerfully white against the bluest sky, and hugs the unsuspecting alternate version of himself tightly as they sit next to each other on the engawa, letting his head fall against his shoulder. He could sort of cry, he could.

“Oi. What’s with you?”, other-him asks with a smile in his voice, patting Iruka’s arm around him, letting his own head loll against his. “Getting tired again?”

“I’m so happy you are here.”, he whispers, “I mean, I hope I didn’t cause you a great mess back in your universe. But you should now I love you so, so much.”

“Been really stuck on this, haven’t you?”, he snorts.

“So stuck.”, Iruka nods against his shoulder, “So tired.”

They sit for a moment in companionable silence, listening to the birds sing.

“Hey, why is everyone calling you Mirai?”

“That’s my ‘handle’ on the internet.”, he says, then adds after a moment, in a most teacher-like voice, “The internet is a… a global network of interconnected computers. Sakura says you do have computers here. Anyway, you can find just about everything, from cat videos to porn on it. Before I adopted Naruto, I liked working on some open source projects and making extra lessons for students. Lessons like ‘always comment your code’...”

Iruka hums innocently, admiring the blue of the sky. Fascinating shapes, the clouds are. Mirai blows air at the top of his head in revenge.

“The internet sounds nice. I’m really sorry for plucking you out.”

He only receives an answering sigh; it’s mostly a tired one, but there is also a hint of desperation in it. 

“I know Naruto can manage for a day or two alone. He’s been practically raising himself in the orphanage, anyway. I just… really want to give him a nice, proper home, you know? With bentos, and dinner together, and going fishing and all that. He deserves it, and he’s twelve, he shouldn’t have to know how to take care of himself. He should be playing Super Smash Bros with Sasuke on his Switch, not trying to cook dinner.”

Iruka glances at the nails of the hand on his arm (bitten), and raises his head to look at his face, a face so remarkably similar to his own, (dark circles under his eyes). “I can understand giving your all”, he whispers, “but if you collapse from exhaustion, you are no use to anyone. Cut yourself some slack. I know what I’m talking about, I’m a pro at driving myself to the brink.”

Chakra-dead Iruka frowns at him, turns to say something, but closes his mouth when Ji-san rounds the corner.

“Hey”, his first summon whines upon seeing them, “He gets a hug?”

“He is not a useless hokage.”, Iruka replies cheerfully while beckoning with his hand; other not-him mutters something about not having chosen being a hokage, and obediently sits down on his other side, letting Iruka put his arm around him.

It’s nice. He can’t decide which shoulder to put his head on, and he kicks the air happily like a schoolboy. Maybe he could be kinder to himself in the future. Like, in the few days left until his execution.

“What on earth is a hokage?”

\---

_You deserve love._

The words toll in Kakashi's head as he stares at the ceiling of the study. The night is quiet around him, Iruka sound asleep again in the futon next to him; exhausted, drained, his face pale but his breathing even, hands curled between them as he rests on his side. He studies Iruka’s palms, the curve of his fingers; looks at the hands that don’t kill day in and out like his, covered in chalk and ink instead, wrapping him in a blanket of children’s laughter and normalcy. 

It would be nice to pretend, that he can be loved. Only a tiny glimpse of what he can’t get, something ordinary that he covets but can’t reach. Kakashi thinks that above all those things they say about him, like friend killer and master of a thousand jutsu, that first and foremost what he is - is a thief.

He reaches out, quiet and tender and afraid, fingers ghosting for a moment over the skin before he allows himself the privilege of truly, really holding his hand. It's warm and calloused and fits perfectly with his, and he breathes against the still of the night, savouring the stolen moment.

Kakashi is a selfish man, someone who just takes and takes and takes, (but maybe, just maybe, Iruka is a selfless man, someone who just gives and gives and gives, and won't mind giving his shivering heart a little bit of that hot aching love he seems to be filled with to the brim).

He traces with his thumb the scar on the left hand, that familiar one he had memorized with his eyes from thumb to index finger.

_You are allowed to be happy._

He wishes the words were true. He wants them to be true, but death and destruction are his constant companions, and he'd destroyed so many in this life already; his mother at his birth, his father with his inability to save him, his old team, his new team. Kakashi leaves broken hearts and lives in his wake only, and something like that deserves no love and no reason to smile.

Kakashi closes his eyes, falling asleep as he pilfers the feeling of Iruka's hand in his.

\---

Iruka springs upright in his futon. He looks left. Looks right. Up. Down. Bounces a bit in place. Whatshouldhedonowhehassomuchenergywow. He should find Mirai. He has ideas. Yes, so many ideas. Hecouldwritesomanysealsandmakesomanycoolthings. He jumps to a standing position, wobbles all the way to the door because his equilibrium is not keeping up with the program. Bad equilibrium. He’ll fire it if it doesn’t bring the standards, there are strict work ethics in place here.

The hallway has become seriously deformed. Wow. Cool. Weird. Someone is messing with gravity. He screams as he lands face first on the hardwood. That was so a zero, he is never making it to the championships.

“Iruka-sensei…?”, Sakura blinks down at him. Iruka grins, he likes Sakura, she is smart and sweet and kind, but also brave and determined and all around a great kid. She is blushing down at him for some reason, helping him up with steady hands. Maybe he said that part out loud? What are thoughts even? “How are you drunk?”

Iruka squints at her, like she said a mysterious mystery thing. “I don’t drink. Hate barfing. No alcohol in this temple. Only gourmet chocolate. Sometimes alcoholic chocolate. Does that count?”

“No.”, she shakes her head with a bitten back smile, pushing him back towards the study. He isn’t sure if he wants to go back, and whines loudly, only to be shushed. “Did you wake up feeling very energetic?”

“Yesyesyes.”, he nods fervently, then stops when his brain hurts from all that sloshing about. “I’m ready to blow stuff up!”, he whispers at her, because she’ll definitely keep this secret. She laughs at him, closing the door behind them.

He lands back on his futon with a little more grace than in the hallway, because practice makes perfect after all. It was definitely a solid two on the scoreboard, he nods to himself, pushing himself up on his elbows to look at Kakashi who Sakura is inspecting now. She doesn’t seem very happy, standing hurriedly.

“Hey, Iruka-sensei, I need you to help me. Can you do that for me?”, Iruka jumps into a sitting position, only suffering a slight vertigo at the action, and she sighs, “Wake him up while I’m gone and don’t let him go back to sleep.”

Iruka salutes her briskly, accepting what feels like the most important mission of the century, and watches her leave quietly.

Okay. So waking up Kakashi. Oh yeah, that will be a breeze. Except, maybe he’ll be killed. Like, everyone says that jonin don’t make good spouses for chunin because they have a tendency to maim you if you wake them up suddenly in the middle of the night, or to not soak their bloodied uniforms before putting them in the wash but that was not the relevant point he was looking for. Yet, he can’t imagine Kakashi not soaking them. Like, there is no way that a man who unclogs sinks at night doesn’t soak his stuff or alphabetize the contents of his instant-packet box.

Iruka takes a minute to appreciate that idea.

But back to plan. He crawls on all fours closer to Kakashi, shaking his shoulder gently. He looks so peaceful like that, but also really tired, and if Sakura hadn’t asked him so seriously to do so, he’d let him sleep some more. He probably needs it, always in and out of the mission room, in and out, scrolls stamped and signed so frequently Iruka feels like he is carrying half of Konoha’s commissions out himself. And the training grounds. Yes, Kazumi always complains at the mission desk about the holes and the general destruction she has to clean up after him.

Kakashi groans softly, and Iruka sits back to marvel at the absolutely groggy man in front of him, watches as he gets up and sways side to side. Holds his shoulders so he wouldn’t fall down, because it seems like it could be an issue.

“What…”, Kakashi mumbles, deciding to rest his head on Iruka’s hand, and wow is that cute he loves that more of that yes, “... happened?”

“Stuff.”, he answers simply. It’s not like he usually knows what’s going on anyway; nobody ever tells him in time who people like Akatsuki are, or what happened to Sasuke, or anything of the sort. He just kind of manages to piece stuff together from Naruto’s ramblings, mission reports and the hints Tsunade throws him. “Sakura said you are not supposed to sleep.”

Kakashi whines, nuzzling his hand, grey eye fluttering closed. He isn’t supposed to sleep though, no matter how fascinating his grey eyelashes are like that. Maybe he should kiss Kakashi. He wants to kiss Kakashi, this is a great idea. He hopes Kakashi wants to kiss him too, and then they’ll both be awake.

Okay, here we go. He takes a big breath, squares his shoulders. Kakashi lifts his head a little to look at what he is doing. He is totally doing this. Iruka nods to himself, and presses his lips softly and quickly to the masked cheek; leans back, ecstatic that he’d done it.

He kissed Kakashi! What victory!

They stare at each other. It feels a little like an eternity, and he begins to wonder if he shouldn’t have done that, if he made a horrible, no good, terrifyingly bad life decision, and lets go of Kakashi’s shoulders, feeling his eyes begin to prickle at the thought that he didn’t want to be kissed by Iruka, and doesn’t want to kiss him back at all.

Curses! This might have been a defeat after all! Maybe- 

The next moment, he is on his back, and lips are pressing into his, first urgent and wanting and sloppy and perfect, and he closes his eyes and grabs a fistful of uniform and hair, pulling and enjoying the way Kakashi presses down on him, a heavy weight to anchor him in the present and the now, clearing his mind from all the frantic bouncing thoughts. And then it’s sleepy and slow and tender, and he loves that too, makes it easier to breathe and he can feel something like electricity under his palms, and grins from ear to ear as they break apart.

Hah, kissing Kakashi _was_ a great idea. He should have done it sooner. He should do it more, yes, definitely, but then there are very loud steps in the hallway, the sort of stern, scary steps teachers and parents have, and Iruka whimpers as Kakashi lies down next to him to stare at the door, because they've been very naughty, haven’t they? Surely this was not what Sakura meant when she told him to keep him awake. No, there was only one solution to this, and it should be executed immediately; he pulls his blanket over both their heads. Kakashi laughs adorably next to him, that cute wheezy laugh and he tries to shush him, but he just won't stop.

“We'll get caught!”, Iruka whines; he doesn't want to get caught, he wants to stay like this just a little more. He puts his hand on Kakashi's mouth in the hopes he would stop, although his efforts at going undetected are hindered by his own noisy shushing.

The door slides open loudly.

“Unbelievable.”, a voice that sound suspiciously like Tsunade says as the footsteps move closer, “By yourselves, you are two of my most responsible and level-headed agents. But in less than a week together, you manage to induce the rarest chakra-intoxication in _each other_.”

The blanket is yanked off, and Iruka whines, squishing his face into Kakashi’s shoulder, who has somehow managed to pull that stupid mask back up. “Give that back!”, he feels the words revibrate in Kakashi’s chest, and is shook by the little hiccup that follows, “We are hiding from you.”

Someone stifles a laugh.

“As much as I would love to let the two of you continue on this journey of being wasted”, she grabs Iruka under his armpit with a strong hand, dragging him upright despite his protests, away from the warmth and the perfection and the happiness, “This is a life-threatening condition for both of you. Get hammered the way everyone else does, brats.”

Iruka reaches out one last time with a long, dramatic ‘noooo’ before there is a pressure on his neck and things go black. Again.

\---

The door rattles in its frame, slamming deafeningly as it is pushed open. Iruka groans into his pillow, his head throbbing with pain as looks up at who he has to murder, only to decide that whoever turned on the sun was making a dreadful decision, promptly burying his face once again.

“I’ve got it.”, Mirai stomps in way too loudly, untrained in his steps and practically hollering for his shinobi ears. He cracks open one eye to look at his newest self, somewhat registering in the periphery of his vision Kakashi pulling his blankets over his head with a dissatisfied noise. “... are you two… hungover?”

“No.”, Iruka tries weakly, receiving a doubtful look as he sits up, holding his head that seems to want to fall apart.

“Wow. Lets get some water in you.”, he takes the offered hand gingerly, “You are going to absolutely hate what I found.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love that scene from the manga where Iruka is debating with himself if Naruto can beat Neji in the final round of the chunin exams, and there is a huge, absolutely 90s computer next to him. Oh, think of the ninja webrings. The sparkly gifs. The forums.


	8. A job well done

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thank you to everyone who stuck around, gave kudos and commented! Your support means a lot, and I'm always tremendously happy to see I've managed to make someone smile! I've actually finished the next chapter of this silly thing as well (what a surprise), and will post it sometime next week, so stay tuned!

“No.”, Iruka breathes, hoping the painkiller he just swallowed will numb the searing ache that is currently his brain, “No.”

“Yes.”, Mirai nods, and he looks away with a wince at that, watches Iruka-san finish packing up her tray and hand Naruto a glass of orange juice with the silliest looping straw he’s seen in a while, which the boy takes with a happy laugh. Iruka likes that sound, Naruto laughing, but kinda wishes it wouldn’t threaten to destroy his head by making it explode. 

“No.”, he tries again, desperate, staring now again at the unfolded schemata on the kitchen table, “Please, no.”

Naruto slurps noisily as he leans against the counter, the sound grating on his nerves more than scratching fingernails on blackboards do. Iruka-san leaves the kitchen quickly and quietly, no doubt sensing the drama attempting to spill out of him at this madness Mirai is proposing.

“Yes.”, Mirai points once again to that fatal place in his plan, a plan he can bear to look at no longer. He turns his back on the table, throwing his head back to stare at the ceiling; on second thought, he covers his face with his hands, because everything is way too bright, and doesn’t sob on account of manliness and severe dehydration. He can feel his third summon pat his shoulder a couple of times before moving away, “Come get me once you are over it.”

Iruka lets out a strangled sound as the kitchen door closes again, sinking to his knees and laying down on the nice, soothingly cold tile of the floor, which feels great against his stupid head.

He groans like it’s his last day on earth.

“So theatrical, Iruka-sensei.”, his favorite person on earth says, and he cracks open an eye to see a lanky teenager body lie down next to him. He sobs a couple of fake sobs for good measure at that, until he is shoved unceremoniously onto his back with a push stronger than was probably intended, and he lets out a quiet ‘oof’. “Sorry.”

Why did he have this terrible headache anyway? It reminds him of when he was fifteen, stealing a whole bottle of… sake? Wine? Vodka? He doesn’t really remember anymore, just the fact that he drank the whole damn thing because everyone else was always saying stuff about how much they could hold their liquor and he wasn’t about to be outdone, only to discover he most definitely was. For a lifetime. He flattens his palms on the cold floor, focusing on the warm humm of Naruto’s chakra next to him instead.

“Hey, Iruka-sensei…?”

“Hmm?”

“Before I left… I… I wanted to be adopted too.”

Iruka’s eyes are wide open, despite the pain of light.

Naruto sits up, turning his head away and fumbling with his hands in his lap, looking at once like the same little boy who left and the man who he will become. “But I was afraid to ask, and then I thought maybe after I left you’d have changed your mind-”, but Iruka doesn’t let him finish, heavens no, sits up and wraps his arms around those growing shoulders tightly, pushing his face into the blond locks.

“Never.”, he punctuates the word with a squeeze, “Never ever. Why do you think I have all the ridiculous forms still filled out at home? They will always be there. Unless of course you don’t want them to be. Or my home burns down, in which case I’ll get new ones, but those will be the emotional and intellectual descendants of the perished ones.”

Naruto leans back against him, hands coming up to squeeze his arms with strength he really shouldn’t have and will most likely leave him with bruises, but who the hell cares? Iruka sure as hell doesn’t.

“You are so weird.”, he whispers with a smile in his voice.

(Iruka wonders if Tsunade would be kind enough to let him do this one thing before his execution.)

\---

Kakashi props his heels up and bows his head, just like his grandfather taught him to do. (‘You must know how to properly apologise, boy, even if you never will.’) His brain feels like it’s about to explode, but much more critical than that is the abject horror he feels at his conduct last night - and the certain danger facing him now, in the form of one pink haired teenager standing in front of him, her arms crossed and a most angered look on her face.

He isn’t sure why Iruka-san is standing behind her with a tray. It’s not like Sakura needs the moral support.

“When I began to study with Tsunade-sensei, she warned me about what a horrible patient you are. I didn’t believe her, because my Kakashi-sensei was always responsible and doing the right thing when it counted.”, Sakura huffs, and he feels a pang of pride mixed with affection at that word ‘my’; for a moment before he blinks, his twelve year-old little genin stands in her place, adorable and smart and needing someone much better than him to teach her, “And yet, here you were, not only suffering from severe chakra misalignment silently until you collapsed, but then going further and trying to pass your lightening affinity chakra to a water affinity Iruka-sensei. Who was continuously and actively molding for the summons. And then not closing the pathway until both of you became infected with a volatile mix of the two. I don’t even-”

“I was asleep.”

“You - Kakashi-sensei, how could you fall asleep with an open connected chakra pathway?”

Iruka-san makes a noise, and Kakashi looks up to see her biting her lip very hard, growing a little red in the face as she tries not to laugh, by all accounts. Sakura looks back at him after taking her reaction in, dropping her head in her hands.

“You didn’t even realize you were doing it.”, she mutters, and he feels a little bad about how defeated she sounds, “This is what sensei meant when she said geniuses are always dumbasses. You just probably bumped legs in your sleep or something, and pushed chakra when you felt Iruka-sensei needed it. It mixed, and got pushed back, and you didn’t even wake up when you were almost completely poisoned with it.”

“I apologise, Sakura-chan. Please forgive your old, stupid sensei.”, he tries smiling at her for old time’s sake, but she just throws her head back with a groan, waves in his general direction like she doesn't want anything to do with him, and stomps out. He wonders if this is a bit like being a dad, getting dismissed with loud teenager noises. (His heart hurts.)

Iruka-san lets out the heartfelt laugh the minute the door closes behind Sakura though, the one she has been valiantly holding in; he stares at her gloomily until she is reduced to snorts, shaking her head so her bangs would fall back into place. Really now. He sits back down and hugs his knees to his chest, (most definitely not pouting), nursing his aching head and pointedly not looking at her, not as she brings her tray over and places it next to him. Or when she begins to nudge him with a glass of water. Repeatedly. 

Alright, he does take the offered water at nudge number five, downing it in one gulp and letting the edge of his mask rest on his chin. (Maybe he does pout at her.)

Ah, that water was so good.

“So…”, she gives him a look, stretching out her legs; her ankles are swollen again, and Kakashi reaches over to place several thick books under her feet, then gets up with a groan to bring his grandfather's floor chair over for her when he realises she probably needs the lumbar support. She smiles at him in thanks, leaning back contently and watching him begin to eat the persimmon she brought with unabashed disgust. The taste of it makes him shiver relentlessly with revulsion.

“I’ll cook some shijimi miso later. They say the clams are good for the hangover, although that has never worked for me, personally.”, he is wholly appreciative of how soft-spoken she is right now, because he has never come as close to having his skull crack open by itself like an overripe fruit as he has on this day, even if that devilish woman smile is back. He takes another revolting bite just as her hands sign _sex_ questioningly.

The persimmon takes a detour towards his airway as he stares back in redding shock, coughing heavily.

_Negative_ , he signs intensely, his face hot from embarrassment, and when she gives him a doubtful look, reluctantly, _kiss_.

Her face lights up, grinning from ear to ear at him as she claps her hands together silently. He mouths ‘no!’ as sternly as he can several times, wagging his finger at her, but she just smiles in a way that lets him know she knows just how much he loved that kiss, even if he is afraid of it now. Oh, his head throbs.

He slumps forward with a sigh, staring at the remaining nauseating fruit.

_Drunk. Agreement negative_ , he tries, and throws his hands up in frustration at the limited vocabulary of standard signs, because how do you sign, ‘I don’t even know if this was consensual or not’, ‘what does chakra intoxication even mean for that’, and ‘does he hate me now feeling like I abused him’? Still, Iruka-san is the wife of an alternative version of him, and seems to read the defeat and desperation on his face just as well as his hand gestures.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”, and her voice is comforting and gentle instead of teasing, “I’m quite sure you would have landed in the courtyard, had it been the case. Trust me, we’ve got a technique we’ve inherited from Mom for throwing people very far with great velocity. I use it mostly on my kids at the academy, but, you know.”

(She yeets them into the landing mats, he thinks abruptly with some amusement, oddly comforted by the notion that (his) Iruka does the same.)

“However”, she continues, pointing once again at a fruit Kakashi doesn’t feel like eating but will at the silent order, (maybe… he is also whipped), “if you feel so bad about it, I recommend apologising. That never hurt anyone.”

He barfs a little at the taste, and has to clamp his hand over his mouth.

\---

Iruka stares at the ground. Maybe if he does it hard and long enough, both his headache and his incredibly stupid mistake will go away, but the odds of that happening seem negligible in the grand scheme of things. He groans when Ji-san claps him on the shoulder with more force than is comfortable right now.

“I have to admit, it doesn’t look much different.” 

“That’s because it’s not.”, he whines, turning to put his aching head on not-him’s conveniently located shoulder and screw his eyes shut against the bastard light, “Except for one thing.”

“What one thing?”, his unwitting refuge against the sun asks, putting his arm around him in a gesture he would have found strange and disturbing a couple of days ago, but has grown to almost like, “Also, are you hungover?”

Iruka stifles a dramatic sob, opting for a more reserved but no less dramatic sigh. “You know how every subset element has an opening ‘a’ and a closing ‘un’?”

“No. You didn’t, Iruka-chan.” 

But alas, like the dumbest dumbass he is, he did. The truth of it is enough to make him question why exactly he liked working with seals in the first place. “I… I forgot an ‘un’.”, he whispers, full of shame, because who forgets to check for opening and closing characters when something doesn’t work? Complete beginners, that’s who, not people like Iruka with huge demolitions and original wards and A-class deconstruction of enemy seals under his belt. Buddhas, his head hurts.

“Wow, you dumbest dumbass. No wonder you're not the hokage.”

He punches Ji-san in the stomach. _The nerve_.

\---

His first summon’s angry holler at the rather deserved retaliation for his incredible rudeness results in everyone gathering around and the actual reverse summon taking place faster than Iruka would have expected, the events like a whirlwind around him; they do a group hug, which is weird but also really nice, even though Ji-san continues to glare at him in a patented old man fashion, and Iruka-san also gives him a tiny kiss on the cheek, which is just adorable, (and Iruka wishes he could have had more time with her, at least enough for her to teach him how to cook like one thing without burning down his kitchen), but then Mirai pushes him towards the seal impatiently, his empty coffee mug in his hand, bag over his shoulder, muttering testily about ending this nervous breakdown hell while the remains of Team Seven settle down on the engawa (Kakashi holding his head and most suspiciously shielding his eye from the sun).

So.

Iruka kneels with his counterparts alongside him. They are doing this. It should work. They should all end up where they are supposed to be. Yes, he is confident it should be okay. Ugh, he really, really hopes it will be okay, because he is so low on chakra his first year students could probably kick his ass. Wow, it’s happening. Shouldn’t they have breakfast first? And then maybe lunch, just to prepare properly and have time to say goodbye and-

“Just do it!”, Mirai yells at him from across the courtyard. “I don’t have time for your emotional rambling.” 

Iruka pouts. Why were all versions of him - minus sweet Iruka-san -, cheeky rude devils? “Fine.”, he mutters, looking at his other two summons and taking a deep breath before pressing his palms to the ground and beginning. 

(It burns, and his head aches with the pulsing rhythm of the seal.)

The courtyard lights up eerily, a shimmering blue that reflects like a pool of water would on their faces, and he watches in elation as Mirai disappears in a brilliant sparkle of light, Naruto cheering loudly behind him. Yes, it’s finally working! His arms tremble, but he keeps them pressed down, continues to mold the chakra even when it feels like he is barely able, especially when Iruka-san stands and leaves for the middle. The colors change and shift, the destination resetting itself as she stands in the circle; he hopes the time is set right, and she lost just a few days to him. A pang of sorrow hits him when she evaporates, breath coming in shallow gasps; he sways a little when Ji-san gets up, hurries to his spot. The seal grows brighter, warmer, almost like embers underneath his palms, and he stares at that stupid face, his face, older and wiser and a lot more idiotic. Ah, is he actually going to miss the bastard? He grunts with the effort to push one last wave of chakra into his work, and to his surprise his heart feels torn out of his chest when with one last terrible smile, Ji-san vanishes. No, that’s not even the right way to phrase it.

He feels _empty_.

Iruka looks to the clouds, those stupid, heartless clouds that never give a damn about him, wondering why everything is going rapidly dark again. Oh right, he is fainting.

\---

“Hey.”, Kakashi says to his grandmother’s tree. He sits down improperly on the bench, shoulders sagging from everything that has happened today; sighing, he takes off his headband, lets it fall heavily on the wood as he massages his aching temples. (He wishes one of them were here. His grandmother, his grandfather, his father… maybe even his mother, whom he never had the chance to know. Wonders absently if there is place out there, beyond death, where he could tell them everything one last time.), “I cleaned up the courtyard, and Naruto took the things back to Iruka-sensei’s place… Sakura said he’ll be fine, but that he should still be hospitalized. I…”

It’s odd. He almost never does this, not with his family; sometimes with Obito, or Rin, or Sensei at the memorial, if he feels twisted to the brink, if it feels like he could choke from the thoughts and feelings welling up inside, letting the dead hear words he never would have uttered them when they were alive. He runs a hand through his hair, lets his head hang.

But it was… strange, being here again for so long. It felt a little like home again, in the end. (It hadn’t felt like home for a very long time, not since that night, in the other wing.) He thinks about dogs and children and saury in another dimension somewhere, about the splint vambrace he’d left behind, of the tanto, and has to clench his jaw to keep himself from screaming.

Kakashi closes his eye against it all. 

He doesn’t want to think about it.

He doesn’t want to feel the _jealousy_.

Was it luck? Timing? Something else that allowed his father to survive that night? He bites the inside of his cheeks so as not to scream, and forces himself to swallow the bile of pain and rage at the world, knowing that sometimes luck really is the only difference between life and death.

But it also makes him remember what he has forgotten for so long, this… comparison. That year preceding the blood on the floor, the one filled with harassing jonins, with silent dinners, with a perpetually burning oil lamp, the bags under his father's eyes, the slump of his shoulders. How Kakashi used to hide knives from him, an impossible task in a shinobi household. It makes him think that maybe it wasn’t easy for Bakashi either, surviving Sakumo’s descent into darkness and building him up again. That maybe when he said Kakashi deserved love, he was talking out of experience, about that guilt and rage still festering the depths of his soul underneath all the other scars he carries, the one that first told him that if he wasn’t good enough for his own father to stay and love him, then maybe he wasn’t good enough to be loved by anyone at all. The one that keeps whispering in his ear, that maybe if he tried harder, been better, that he’d still have a father. 

That maybe the blood on the tatami that never comes out is his own damn fault.

Kakashi blinks up at the blue sky, willing the prickle behind his eye away. He knows it’s not true. He knows his father loved him, that perhaps the only reason he even came back time and again was him, that the reason he kept insisting he be friends with Gai and respect Dai was because he wanted him to have people around him. He knows.

But sometimes he is still angry that he isn’t here to tell him to marry someone. He is less and less so as the years go by; he sometimes likes to imagine instead - practiced, now, in conjuring up false images for genjutsu traps -, how he would sit next to him (tell him to sit properly), and say all the things Kakashi would need him to say.

Like how he should be happy. Like Bakashi had.

“I miss you all very much.”

Maybe, that annoying, perfect version of himself had a point. That he has to let go of the past a little, or at least a version of the past he's grown used to remembering, the one that makes him angry. To remember instead his grandfather's games, his grandmother's smile, his father's love. To refute that aching wound and say; ... he deserves love.

(To say that he wants to be loved. Desperately.)

“What did you think of them all? Naruto is a handful, but he has a good heart, and Sakura is brilliant. She has really grown… I… and Iruka-sensei… he's very kind. Usually a little less stressed out and exhausted.”

Kakashi closes his eye, and imagines for a moment (his) Iruka sitting here again on the bench, hot tea in his hand, smiling with him at the sunrise. That was Kakashi's, that moment, his to savor and keep hidden.

He thinks about the kiss too, deep and electric and more than he ever dreamed, and tries not to cry at the thought that maybe he had wasted all the other soft morning smiles and mission room laughter he would have had on one drunken kiss. 

\---

Iruka jerks awake. He jerks awake so much, he actually sits up and almost manages to bang his head against his hokage’s, which is an electrifying realization in and of itself, and he blinks rapidly around the… hospital room. Standard, one bed hospital room.

One finely manicured finger pushes against his forehead, and he is forced back down onto his pillow as if ten men were pressing on him; he relents easily, disoriented as he is, choosing to stare at her face, sharp features that were the lie and the truth at the same time. (He’d always liked that about her, admired her for being brash and afraid, forceful and gentle, kind and cruel in one person. Sure, her handwriting is horrible, and Iruka wishes she’d wear something a bit less revealing because it makes work at the mission desk all sorts of awkward sometimes, and she has a habit of telling horrible jokes, but generally? Generally Iruka really cherishes her for being the way she is.) She looks somewhere between amused and worried right now.

“You are a very troublesome little brat.”, Tsunade mutters, taking a swing of the sake flask on the bedside table, “The exhaustion is one thing, but this whole intoxication business was on a different level, I hope you know that.”

Intoxi-

Oh. Oh no. He snaps upright again as the memory comes rushing back, of flailing about on the floor, of Sakura giggling at him, of Kakashi, and sweetsageofthesixpathshewaskissing-

“Yeah, that’s right. Probably making out like two stupid teenagers, unlike the actual teenagers on the premises.”, she rolls her eyes, pushing him down once again, “Now, about this seal of yours; I hope it doesn’t come as a surprise when I say you shouldn’t use it ever again, and that you need to destroy all extant copies you may still have at home. And that everything that happened this past week _hadn’t_ happened.”

Aw shit, he forgot the part about being executed. (Can he still adopt Naruto before that?) But maybe that’s not such a bad thing, considering his face is about to melt off and he can never ever be in the same room as Hatake Kakashi again, for fear of death by pure embarrassment. Damn those stupid clouds! How could he do that? How could he kiss him, and then just… continue to do so? Gosh, the man must resent him truly by now. Yes, yes, he should just get executed, that would be a nice clean ending to this week of horror and terror and also just a hint of nice with Naruto.

“Of course, hokage-sama.”, she takes another huge swig, and the thought occurs to him that maybe she isn’t here so much as to check on his condition but to hide from Shizune and have a place to drink, which, well, if he was hokage - and hey, there is a universe out there where he is -, he’d probably also have some sort of unhealthy coping mechanism, like knitting, so he can understand. And empathize. “May I know, when… when am I to be… ah, permanently punished?”

Tsunade frowns down at him at these words, pinching his arm. Hard. (He yelps.)

“Iruka. I’m not executing a brilliant fuinjutsu specialist for mucking around with a new seal. Sure, it’s technically illegal, but so is this.”, she finishes her bottle with a satisfied smack of her lips, turning towards the door with the air of someone satisfied with a job well done, even though she most likely hadn’t done a thing, “Just be a little more careful with testing first. And shove your tongue down Kakashi’s throat at regular intervals, so he doesn’t end up here as often as he does.”

She closes the door behind herself before Iruka’s face can explode off, leaving him to stare at the clock ticking close to midnight.

But - He - She couldn’t possibly - They aren’t - Gods, he kissed Kakashi…!

… he….

… he kissed Kakashi. (Iruka groans into his pillow, and thinks about trying to suffocate himself with it.)


	9. The power of the written word

_‘Dear Me,_

_it has come to my attention during our brief period of acquaintance that you are, and I write this with the utmost adoration and love, an idiot.’_

Now, Iruka has to pause to stare at the wall a little bit, fuming quietly before he can continue reading the letter Iruka-san has given him before summoning Mirai. (It’s still early, so, so early, and he is stuck in the hospital in his very sterile bed after Tsunade had left him to contemplate his continued existence and that ~~amazing~~ kiss, and reading the letter seemed like a good way to pass the time. And not think about the kiss. Or stare at the ceiling and freak out about the kiss. Or hold his pillow against his face and wonder about the kiss. It seemed like a good distraction, is what he is implying here. He is reconsidering his stance on the matter.)

_‘There is, of course, the issue of your continued lack of self-confidence, for which I would like to vehemently scold you; just because we haven’t a whole village to put into their place doesn’t mean our responsibilities are any less important. I know you know this, but I feel that you need a reminder in the wake of both Ji-san’s prowess and arrogance, and our mutual desperation at having been left behind by Naruto during his training. We do not handle letting our loved ones go well, you and me, and I know I have cried many a night feeling abandoned by the boy I felt I was a mother to.’_

(Iruka sighs, and tries not to think too hard about when Naruto will leave again - if he has maybe already left, having stayed more than the day or two Jiraiya usually allows for them in Konoha. He knows it’s for his safety, his growth, his future, but that doesn’t mean his heart can’t break at the thought of not knowing when he will see him next.)

_‘However, the above has not been the reason that had prompted me to pen this letter to you. No, the particular dumbassery I am referring to concerns both you and the Kakashi of this dimension._

_Being fundamentally the same character as you, it has been obvious to me that you do hold tender emotions inside that gigantic stupid heart of yours for him; being of same nature as Kakashi, on the other hand, I had also deduced and confirmed rather quickly his own attraction to you._

_It was not advanced multi-dimensional jutsu theory.’_

What? He blinks breathlessly at the words as he feels a blush envelope his face, and wishes Iruka-san would have told him this in person, so he could have flailed and freaked and doubted this information loudly and repeatedly, because saying ‘what? no! what? noooo!’ for five minutes to a paper is just simply not the same. 

(He has a feeling this is exactly why she wrote the letter.)

“What? No. Whaaat? Nooooooo.”, he whispers, clapping himself on the cheeks. That can’t possibly be true! Kakashi can’t possibly like him, Umino Iruka, of all people. He wasn’t anything special, he begins to think, but then looks at the letter and the words lack of self-confidence jump out at him. 

He frowns.

Alright, he thinks to himself slowly, forcing himself to form the thought; I’m okay, I have many things to be proud of. It feels strange and awkward, and he wants to take it back even if it is only in his head, but then he thinks about Ji-san and the way he carried himself, the way he was sure and steady and how all of these qualities were, it stood to reason, hidden in him as well. Sure, Mom and Dad could help him along and influence some of the events that had shaped his life, but… but there was nothing different in abilities. Ji-san was a weapons expert, specialised in close combat; that was pure hard work.

The thought that he could be a hokage if he wanted to be is... nice. He doesn’t want to be, mind you. He loves teaching, and now that he thinks about it, can’t wait to get back to his bratty little class as soon as he can; he smiles when he thinks about all the ways they’ll jump in excitement when learning proper landings in the gym, or how they’ll groan at another hour of theory, and of how pleased he’ll be when they graduate.

Yes, he can be proud of his work. Oh, and he did manage to invent multi-dimensional summoning by accident. And Naruto, he is so proud of Naruto, although strictly speaking that didn’t belong in this category, unless he counts the fact that he is proud that he finally owed up to his paternalistic feelings that night in the forest, even if it took Mizuki hurling a giant shuriken into his back to do it. Or his feelings about adoption, even if it took being faced with impending doom and variations of himself to do it. (This emotional honesty thing… might need some work.)

Iruka leans back, watches the rain begin to gently knock on the window, and considers the fact that he basically raised himself from age twelve and still turned out to be a somewhat functioning adult; that also has to count for something. Yes, he’s got a good head on his shoulders, and, as Iruka-san wrote, a ‘gigantic stupid heart’. He smiles, thinks Ji-san would clap him on the shoulder and bump their heads together, and how he’d actually enjoy that, before he remembers the letter in his lap. 

He looks back at the words, ‘deduced and confirmed rather quickly his own attraction to you’ and blushes deeply again.

Kakashi… likes him back? It still seems impossible, but… well… Iruka bites his lip, as he remembers that intoxicated kiss as much as he can, and how, although technically started by him, he played… a bit of a passive role afterwards. Still. That was intoxication. That could mean anything, because chakra was weird and mysterious, even officially.

He could brush this all off as silly and untrue if not for the word ‘confirmed’ written there in nice black ink in a neat hand very familiar to his own. Was he an idiot for not noticing, or was Kakashi just very good at hiding his feelings? (Was it… both?) He decides to read on before his head explodes from too much blushing and spiralling thoughts.

_‘I know not everything of our dimensions aligns the same way; for example, my Kakashi’s father has survived from the brink of honorable suicide, whereas the one of yours, I’m afraid, did not. I tell you this only so that you may understand better how paralyzed he probably is by the fear of loss that has surrounded him hitherto. Jonin lead terrifying lives as we both know, and you should only pursue this avenue of romance if you are sure both in your feelings and faith; please do not hurt him by being unsure, for that would be more cruel than never acting on these at all._

_If you do decide to love him… well, you must be prepared for weeks filled with fear, anxiety and bargaining with the gods for his life, for hospital visits in the dead of night and for goodbyes that always have the chance of being the last before each mission. I won’t lie to you; my marriage is a hard compromise between love and desperation, as are all such marriages._

_Now, if you had pondered my words for a while (please do), please see the next page for a practical tip on pleasing, it seems, both of our Hatake Kakashi-s.’_

A hard compromise, Iruka thinks, mulling the words over as he looks out the window, watching the rain pour with vengeance now; in his mind’s eye is Iruka-san, waiting and pacing, crying and worrying, before he can see her happy and relieved and having everything he thought he so jealously wanted that first morning in the Hatake kitchen. He knows she is right, that jonin are surrounded by multiplied death and destruction until their shortened fifteen years of service are up, often even past that; it’s why many remain chunin with twenty-five years of service and considerably lesser pay, and shy away from them in the first place as romantic partners - especially people like Iruka, who have it nice and easy and safe within Konoha’s walls.

Honorable suicide, she wrote. He wonders how old Kakashi was, if that was before both of those teammates Ji-san had mentioned died; how many names on the memorial mean something to him. It breaks his heart, to think how much grief he can gleam even from these morsels.

Thunder rumbles in the distance.

Maybe Kakashi isn’t like lightning, he thinks, bright and fearsome and a part of the heavens, but a man, kind and funny and hurt deeply by his past; and maybe Iruka wasn’t like moss, growing on the bottom of the forest floor, but someone who enjoyed his company and cared for his smile and had love he wanted to give him.

Maybe he could bargain with the gods; maybe he could be inclined to make regular donations and offerings, even copy a sutra or two, if it meant he could see Kakashi again and make him smile and laugh that wheezy little laugh.

He toys with the dog tags around his neck.

Maybe. (Certainly.)

\---

“Hey, how’s my favorite disaster?”, a familiar voice chimes from his doorway and Iruka puts down the letter he has memorized by now in surprise, looking up at Kotetsu waving a single daffodil at him. He quickly folds the paper, tucking it away under his pillow as his newest visitor closes the door behind himself and makes his way over to his bedside, pulling up a chair. “Here.”, he says, holding the flower out for him, “Get your ass out of here quickly.”

Iruka takes the flower with a laugh, twirling it about. “I’m just a little low on chakra. I should be out of here by this time tomorrow.”

“That’s good. So…”, Kotetsu leans forward, lowering his voice despite the closed door, “Does this have anything to do with motherfucking Hatake Kakashi coming up to me with a money envelope for marriage with a goddamn golden crane?”

Oh! That’s really nice of him, Iruka thinks as he pointedly stares at the ceiling, if a little over the top with giving more than 50.000.

“Iruka, I’m not going to tell you the number, but damn bitch, it’s enough for the engagement and the wedding. I’ve never seen so much money at once in my life.”

Wow. Fascinating lamps and tiles. Also, how is generosity one of his kinks? He is wired so bizarrely; definitely going to make a complaint when he eventually passes on about that to King Emma. No one should be turned on by a love interest’s philanthropy.

“Really? Everything about it is classified now? Sheesh, Tsunade doesn’t mess around for someone telling everyone left and right that you’ve been hospitalized.”, Iruka’s eyes snap back to his friend at these words, only to jump when the door opens again; and from that point on, his day fills with a steady stream of people coming by and going, people like Izumo and Anko and Ibiki, his colleagues at school and the mission desk, Shizune and Sakura. And, of course, Naruto, who spends most of the afternoon cuddled by his side, narrating adventure after adventure he’d had with Super Pervert.

He’s pleasantly exhausted by the time visiting hours are over, filled to the brim with laughter and love. 

\---

Kakashi should probably still be in bed as far as his personal doctor with pink hair is concerned. Yes, she would insist, he thinks wearily as he pulls on his chain mail. But sitting around thinking of how he basically shoved his tongue down (his) Iruka’s throat while drunk on chakra or something of the sort, coupled with the fact that last week is classified and no part of it may be shared with the emotional sounding board of his life named Gai… well, it is not doing good things for his already questionable sanity.

He throws himself back down onto his bed, muffling a frustrated groan into a pillow he places onto his face. 

Although he might not tell Gai even if he could, because… well, they had known each other since they were very small. Useless little toddlers, as far as he is concerned. And the length of their friendship has provided his friend with the uncanny ability to sort and recognise Kakashi’s own emotions before he himself is aware of them, along with the unfortunate tendency to make use of this ability in ways that provide him with great discomfort. Great, great discomfort - oh, the rounds of janken he has fought over not asking (his) Iruka out! 

(Gai had been so, so very delighted when he caught Kakashi’s gaze lingering that first time.)

(And has not shut up about it ever since. Sigh.)

Of course, that was before he had all but tackled (his) Iruka into the ground in a drunken frenzy, stealing the breath from his lips and ready to devour him like a starving man. It was before he had lost all self-control; it was all fine until this… unfortunate experiment backfired. He had accepted that he was socially awkward at best, (cursed at worst), satisfied with his little home, with the friendships he has, finding joy and comfort in reading and cooking, and nursing a sweet crush on Umino Iruka since the day they'd met with no intention of ever making a move.

He tells himself it's okay, the way things turned out, that he is _fine_. (That he doesn’t need love like that. That he can exist in the vacuum, in that space left behind when everyone has went home from the pub to their lovers, husbands and wives.)

He hugs the pillow against his chest.

He even entertains the idea of trying to reverse engineer Bakashi’s television jutsu, if only to complain about the situation to Iruka-san and reluctantly eat some fruit. (He thinks about what she said, about an apology never hurting anyone, and ponders how he could even phrase it, how he could escape the awkwardness that would settle over them.) He stares at the ceiling until he realizes he is doing exactly the same mental gymnastics that had made him get out of bed in the first place; so he gets up and out and starts the day by buying a nice enough envelope and making a bit of a withdrawal at the bank. (While he does have mixed feelings about the past week, at least other people should have a nice, happy life together. And not commission (his) Iruka to do dangerous things ever again.)

With that errand done, he spends the next two hours in the apple tree in the very back of the hospital grounds, watching the critters crawl about on the bark and hoping that if he disregards these feelings of total helplessness and fear, they’ll eventually become muted enough to ignore. It’s going rather smoothly for a plan he came up with when Gai finally finds him and settles on the other side on a sturdy branch.

He grins at Kakashi. It’s the grin that doesn’t mean any good for him.

“So, one whole week away on a mission with Iruka-sensei…”, his best friend begins airily, looking around the tree with faked nonchalance. Kakashi throws him a dark look for the heck of it. “Can you talk about it...?”

He wonders if Gai would agree with Iruka-san about apologising. He probably would, because he is a nice, proper man with a heart of gold, a sort of person (his) Iruka should end up with, if not for the fact that Gai prefers homely soft girls who like to cook. (How he always manages to blow it by professing his love too quickly, he’ll never know.)

“Not specifically.”, Gai clicks his tongue in annoyance at his answer, “But perhaps… unspecifically.” (Kakashi is a genius after all, and he knows when the thoughts in his head begin to tilt him towards more insane instead of less, and if there is anyone out there in the vastness of space and time that he can trust, it’s the man with the stupidest haircut in all of Fire country sitting with him in an apple tree at three in the afternoon.) “What would you do…”, he begins softly, picking at the bark next to him, “... if… if you, under the influence of a substance, would have irreversibly-”

Gai gasps loudly enough for the few patients walking a bit off to turn their heads towards them. Kakashi gives his friend a heated glare, but he is already clutching his chest melodramatically, throwing his head back with a triumphant grin.

“My prayers and donations have finally been heard! Oh, how sad that I cannot learn of the minute details of this most wondrous event, but still! What joy! What fortunate turn of events!”

Alright, maybe this was a bad idea. He turns to jump out of the tree and run as far away as possible. (He is most definitely thankful for Gai not learning the minute details. Also, why was he praying for Kakashi to be intoxicated?) Unfortunately, someone grabs the back of his vest and pulls him back sharply, and he resigns himself to a couple more minutes of listening to the newest ode to the power of youthful love.

“You are missing the point.”, he mutters once that is done, “There was… non-willfulness involved. I… there is no way to gauge how he felt about the whole thing, and how can I even allow myself to be in the same room, if…”

Gai kicks him out of the tree without much effort.

“Apologise!”, his best friend in the whole world yells at him from above. Kakashi groans back at him, head spinning. “And then bang him with the power of youthful love and appreciation!”

“Why are you like this.”

\---

It was kind of heartless of the medics to kick him out at two in the morning because they suddenly needed the room, Iruka thinks with a pout, dragging his feet along the road home. His messenger bag drags down his shoulder still, and he shifts it uncomfortably, thinking of his own dearly missed bed. Oh yes, his bed, an actual bed, not just a futon on a tatami, with a mattress and off the ground, and his several fluffy pillows. And his bathtub! God, how he has missed the ability to set the water temperature electronically! And his pajamas, don’t get him started on his pajamas. As soon as he is home, he is putting on his favorite pair, snuggling in under his heavy blanket, and not waking up until who knows when. Yes, Iruka is going to freaking hibernate, then deal with everything else his life has become, making huge decisions pertaining to his future. (Good thing they said to take it easy for a couple more days, giving him a week of medical leave. Ample time to let his inner gremlin free, order takeout in his rattiest pants, and not comb his hair for days.) In short, it'll be nice to sleep in his own home, to read lazily on his balcony, to enjoy some delicious takeout… okay, who is he kidding, he is going to work on that other fuinjutsu project as soon as he wakes up today. Pfft. 

There is someone by his door.

He stops at the corner coming up the stairs in surprise, ducking back on instinct. He squints in confusion at the darkness, glad for once that his landlord keeps forgetting to fix the light in the stairwell. Why would anyone be at his door before the crack of dawn? A burglar? Why would a burglar use the front door? Maybe a nemesis? But Iruka is too inconsequential to have a nemesis. Maybe this is a kidnapping deal, to torture Naruto? Gosh, he is too tired to be in distress right now. He carefully takes the small mirror out of his vest, using it to look at his potential intruder or attacker.

He could swear that was motherfucking Hatake Kakashi standing there.

Iruka’s eyebrows climb upwards in surprise, watching the man shift his weight from foot to foot in his mirror. He seems to be having an inner battle, and Iruka-san’s words about _attraction_ and _love_ begin to bang about his head, making his face heat up again. Should he… go there?

Oh, it was far too early in the day for confessing anything other than his love for his own bed.

He watches Kakashi begin to turn, before abruptly stopping. Obviously having noticed something in the corridor continuing to his side, he takes several steps and squats down, partially hidden by the overflowing plants Iruka’s neighbor keeps there. (He wanted to complain to their mutual landlord about the bugs and the leaves and the dirt the tomatoes, salads and strawberries in the open hallway where bringing, but suave old Miyako-san knew that his silence could be bought with fresh produce without much trouble. Damn, those strawberries were free _and_ delicious.)

(Now that he thinks about it, many of his neighbors rely on him keeping his mouth shut in exchange for food or other goods. Like the man in 1A who keeps bringing him laundry detergent for not mentioning why the stairwell light is always broken, or the lady on the top floor with her exquisite incense whose kid he keeps an eye on when her ‘friends’ visit and for which visits their landlord would surely have her kicked out. Personally, Iruka thinks their landlord can go drown in his piles of money for that.)

Kakashi stands, putting a snail gingerly onto a hanging pot with strawberries.

Oh, all buddhas and bodhisattvas and gods above, he loves that man, even if Miyako-san won’t thank him for that particular good deed. He notices that there is an envelope in his other hand, small and white and most likely meant for him, and debates with himself for a split second if he should let Kakashi leave it here, or force them both to face the consequences of their drunken stupor thing like actual, albeit barely functioning, adults. 

(He thinks about Mirai, about how he is younger and alone and incapable of protecting himself, but still could square his shoulders and adopt Naruto and face everything he has been dreading, and steps out into the hallway, tucking his mirror away. If Mirai could do all those brilliant things, he can too.)

Kakashi turns around instantly from where he has faced Iruka’s door again, his quarter of a face slightly red, the envelope disappearing behind his back. He reminds Iruka of one of his very small students, and it makes him smile.

“Iruka-sensei.”, he whispers, gaze falling to the ground, “I didn’t know you’d be coming home now. I’ll-”

“I’m glad you are here.”, he cuts in, letting his bag fall to the ground. It feels like there are stones in it. “I wanted to apologise to you. For, uhm… well, I guess most of last week. But particularly for siphoning chakra out of you, I think. I’m a little hazy on the details, to be honest.”

Oh, this was a bad idea. He can’t look Kakashi in the face, and how on earth is he going to phrase stuff like ‘sorry for making out with you but not really because gosh that was hot and I really want to do it again hey by the way I’m totally in love with you kay thanks bye’? Haha, he is doomed. So doomed. Why did he step out of the dark? Oh yeah, stupid inspirational alternative selves.

“I… I also wanted to apologise.”, he looks back up at the soft murmur, stares mesmerised at those silver lashes, “I didn’t meant to force… I mean, I’m sorry for, uhm, sexually assaulting you while under the influence.”

Iruka blinks rapidly at the man.

“I don’t think it counts as assault if I enjoyed it, Kakashi-sensei.”, he blurts out, wincing at his stupid brain and his lack of filter. He can feel his face heat up to even higher temperatures like some malfunctioning oven, especially when the goddamn crush of his life looks up at him as though he has said something revolutionary. He barely manages to gabber with his one remaining breath, “I mean... uhm… I kissed you first anyway so who is the assaulter now?”

“The proper term is assailant.”, Kakashi breathes, and when he looks back at him in mild incredulity for focusing on the wrong thing, hello, that quarter of a face is so much more redder than his is, “I… I also liked kissing you very much, to be honest, and-”

Alright. His brain has exploded. His death certificate will read, cause of death: maddening attraction to Hatake Kakashi. He doesn’t really know what comes over him then, because hey, brain is floating about in the stratosphere, but he reaches out and pulls on the other man’s vest, enough to bring him close enough to press a soft kiss on the clothed mouth. He can hear Kakashi’s breath catch, can smell smoke and alcohol on him and wonders if he has spent the night in a bar, worrying about what to say to him, and thinks about pushing him against his door and pulling down his mask and doing things to him that would definitely get him thrown out of the apartment complex for public indecency.

And just like that, it happens again. 

Before he knows it, his back is against the wall and he is holding on to Kakashi’s vest and grabbing at his coarse hair and there are lips against his, urgent and seeking and a body pressing against him hungrily, as if space existing between any parts of them is hybris against the truth of the universe itself. He kisses back, doesn’t dare open his eyes for fear of the moment vanishing, just kisses and hopes Kakashi can feel in the way he holds him how much he wants him here and always, how he wants to take this risk, how it doesn’t matter how much money he’ll have to spend on idiotic monks and priests as longs as he is allowed to kiss him like this every day for the rest of his life.

“I’m not a good man for you to be with.”, Kakashi mutters when they finally break apart, out of breath and sounding like he is trying to convince himself more than Iruka, “I’m bad luck, I’ll hurt you. You shouldn’t like me.”

Iruka smiles, firmly holding onto that vest, eyes still shut. “That’s my decision to make, not yours. All you should worry about is deciding if you'd like to come in now and have lunch at a nice restaurant later, or have said lunch first after we've both slept like we probably should and then come in. If you want.", and pulls him closer, hoping with every fiber of his being Kakashi won't choose option c, running away and breaking Iruka's heart into tiny pieces. 

... They eventually make it inside his apartment for option a.

\---

He’s almost forgotten about page two.

Not that… not that he is not managing the pleasing part, he thinks with a self-satisfied smirk as he looks over his shoulder at his disheveled bed and the even more disheveled man in it. Oh yes, pleasing, he is good at, at least according to said man. Ahem.

Iruka pulls his worn uniform pants closer to the edge of the bed, managing to extract the crumpled pages of his letter with minimal noise while most definitely not getting out of said bed. He settles back among his many pillows to read page two of his female version’s sage advice by the morning light with Kakashi breathing softly next to him. (They were both exhausted, and technically on medical leave. Also, it was either this or staring at the sleeping crush of his life adoringly like a creep, so.)

_‘Sanma Shioyaki._

_If you mess this up, you are a bigger idiot than I took you for and should go to Genmei’s restaurant of the third block by the west gate for second best results. I believe in you, even if Naruto claims you have the ability to burn water and I saw you almost cook scrambled eggs that were more shell than eggs._

_Equipment: toaster oven - I do not trust you with a broiler, much less with grilling charcoal._

_Ingredients: 1 pacific saury; half a tablespoon of sake, some good sea salt (don’t cheap out on this), one tablespoon of daikon radish (grated, squeeze the water out), about a tablespoon of soy sauce, and one sudachi citrus halved._

_Instructions:  
Step One. Cut the fish in half or thirds so it fits in your toaster oven. You could optionally remove the guts by opening it on the stomach side, but do that once you’ve mastered the basics. My Kakashi prefers it without the guts, but doesn’t mind either way anyway. If you do, wash it thoroughly in cold water. Pat it dry._

_Step Two. Marinate the fish in the sake for five minutes while you preheat your oven to about 200. Really, do preheat it, I know you think it’s a waste of electricity, but it’s not. If you do not do so despite this warning, I will crawl out of your TV and do horrible things that will make you regret this decision. Line a pan with wrinkled aluminum foil, so the skin won’t stick to it. After the five minutes are up, wipe the sake off the fish._

_Step Three. Put salt on the fish, right before you put it in the oven! This is important, only right before! The amount of salt depends on whether or not you cheaped out, and how salty you want it. Ask Kakashi if you don’t know. Don’t even think about making this alone as a surprise, you are not at that level._

_Step Four. Place fish on foil, grill until it’s a little brown and blistered. Do not leave the kitchen during this. If you removed the guts, the inside should be almost white. Flip the fish with care, because the skin has a habit of sticking. Grill the other side. As before, do not leave the kitchen. Watch the fish, and remove when that side looks ready. If you left the kitchen and burnt the fish, you are an idiot and I love you._

_Step Five. Serve it with the wedges, the grated daikon and the soy sauce._

_Step Six. Profit. <3’_

How rude.

(Iruka thinks about his friendly, well used toaster oven. It could fit a saury cut in half.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who took part on this rather silly journey with me, to everyone who has left kudos, and all those who have left me delightful comments! You have brough much joy into my life, and I hope I could bring a smile to your face too!
> 
> I was tempted to write an epilogue wherein Naruto celebrates his boyhood dream of having his two father figures in love come true, but when I looked up the recipe for salt broiled saury, I knew what I had to do. Credit for the recipe goes to [Just One Cookbook](https://www.justonecookbook.com/sanma-shioyaki-salt-grilled-pacific-saury/).


End file.
